Page:Marriage as a Trade.djvu/87

 That confusion of one virtue with virtue in general was certainly of masculine origin arising from the masculine habit of thinking of woman only in connection with her relations to himself. To other aspects of her life and character man was indifferent—they hardly existed for him. And of masculine origin, too, was that extraordinary article of the code by which it was laid down that a woman's "honour" was, to all intents and purposes, a matter of chance—a thing which she only possessed because no unkind fate had thrown her in the way of a man sufficiently brutal to deprive her of it by force. Her honour, in short, was not a moral but a physical quality.

One sees, of course, the advantage from the male point of view, of this peculiar provision of the code. In a world where the pickpocket class had the upper hand a somewhat similar regulation would, no doubt, be in force; and it would be enacted, by a custom stronger than law, that to have one's pocket picked was in itself a disgrace which must on no account be cried aloud upon the housetops or communicated to the police. To reveal and publish the fact that