Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/304

290 woman is concerned. The woman of our civilization is taught to consider matrimony as her only life career and marriage her only destiny. Only by marriage does she attain to the gratification of all her physiological wants, great and small. She must marry in order to exercise her natural rights as a complete and mature individual, in order to receive the consecration of motherhood or simply in order to be protected from poverty and distress. This last consideration does not influence heiresses, but in spite of the fact that most of them realize the immorality of a marriage without love and that many of them carry their desire to marry from mutual affection to such an extent that it is almost a mania, leading them to consider all their suitors as fortune-hunters, yet they, most of all, are the victims of this fatal perversion of truth, which has substituted sheer egotism for love in the contraction of a marriage. There are too many men sufficiently degraded to consider a life-interest in a wife's fortune as a possession to be desired above all others. They will make every effort to win the wealthy heiress, not because they love her but because they want her property. They humor all her whims; if she yearns for love, they feign it with the more intensity the less reality there is in their protestations. The probabilities are that the heiress, young and inexperienced, bestows her hand upon the most unworthy suitor of all those with whom she is surrounded, because he is usually the most skillful and unswerving dissembler. She discovers too late that she also, in spite of her material independence, has married a man who has no affinity for her but only for her fortune, and that she must either renounce the thought of love, or must seek for it outside of her home, exposing herself to dangers of all kinds and the contempt of all moral censors. But heiresses are only a small minority in the world, all other women are