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 lives in one long struggle to gratify an uncontrollable desire for admiration at each other's expense. (I have myself been told by a man that he would never be so foolishly discourteous as to praise one woman in another's hearing. I, on my part, desirous also of being wisely courteous, did not attempt to shake the magnificent belief in his own importance to me which the statement betrayed.) Admiration is a very real passion in some women, as it is a very real passion in some men; but what, in women, is often mistaken for it is ambition, a desire to get on and achieve success in life in the only way in which it is open to a woman to achieve it—through the favour of man. Which is only another way of saying what I have insisted on before—that a good many feminine actions which are commonly and superficially attributed to sexual impulse have their root in the commercial instinct.

It is because women, consciously or unconsciously, recognize the commercial nature of the undertaking that they interest themselves so strongly in the business of match-making, other than their own. Men have admitted that