Page:Marriage as a Trade.djvu/40

 life that we were taught to shrink from means the fighting of a good fight.... Selfishness, perhaps—all selfishness—this pleasure in ourselves and in the late growth of that which our training had denied us. But then, from our point of view, the sin and crime of woman in the past has been a selflessness which was ignoble because involuntary. Our creed may be vague as yet, but one article thereof is fixed: there is no merit in a sacrifice which is compulsory, no virtue in a gift which is not a gift but a tribute.