Page:Marriage as a Trade.djvu/197

 for sexual intercourse is usually ignored by an imitative feminine art—because it is lacking in man, and is, therefore, not really grasped by him. When he becomes aware of it he dislikes it-and draws a Becky Sharp (who has the secret sympathy of every woman not an heiress in her own right—if also the openly-expressed contempt).

Women who have treated of maternity in books or pictures have usually handled it in exactly the same spirit in which it is commonly handled by men—from what may be termed the conventional or Raphaelesque point of view. That is to say, they treat it from the superficial point of view of the outsider, the person who has no actual experience of the subject; yet even the most acid and confirmed of spinsters has an inside view of maternity unattainable by the most sympathetic and intuitive of men—since it has once been a possibility in her life. Yet from woman's art and woman's literature what does one learn of the essential difference between the masculine and feminine fashion of regarding that closest of all relations—the relation of mother and child?