Page:Marriage as a Trade.djvu/98

 only lives for the convenience of others. The ordinary male ideal of a wife is a servile ideal—a person with less brains than himself, who is pleasant to look at, makes him comfortable at home and respects his authority. And it is the unfortunate fact that she is expected to live down to this ideal—and very often does—which accounts for that frequent phenomenon, the rapid mental deterioration of the woman who has fulfilled her destiny and attained to a completeness that is synonymous with stagnation.

It is obvious that marriage—the companionship of two reasonable human beings—ought not, under natural conditions, to have a stupefying effect upon one of the parties to the arrangement; and, as far as I can see, where the woman is recognized as a responsible human being with an individuality and interests of her own, and with a right to her own opinion, it does not have that effect. The professional woman—a class which I know fairly well—is not, as a rule, less interesting and individual after marriage than before it, simply because she does not usually marry the type of man who would expect her to swamp her own ideas and personality in his;