“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence.”
(It must be very pleasant to be a man and to entertain that
conviction.) Translated into feminine and vulgar prose, the effusion
runs something like this—
The housekeeping trade is the only one open to us—so we enter the
housekeeping trade in order to live. This is not always quite the same
as entering the housekeeping trade in order to love.
No one can imagine that it is the same who has ever heard one haggard,
underpaid girl cry to another, in a burst of bitter confidence—
“I would marry any one, to get out of this.”
Which, if one comes to think of it, is hard on “any one.”