mode of social organization than that you have adopted, which would have
set men free of one another. I suppose, by the way, that so entire a change in
the position of women cannot have taken place without affecting in marked ways
the social relations of the sexes. That will be a very interesting study for
me.«
    »The change you will observe,« said Dr. Leete, »will chiefly be, I think,
the entire frankness and unconstraint which now characterizes those relations,
as compared with the artificiality which seems to have marked them in your time.
The sexes now meet with the ease of perfect equals, suitor to each other for
nothing but love. In your time the fact that women were dependent for support on
men made the woman in reality the one chiefly benefited by marriage. This fact,
so far as we can judge from contemporary records, appears to have been coarsely
enough recognized among the lower classes, while among the more polished it was
glossed over by a system of elaborate conventionalities which aimed to carry the
precisely opposite meaning, namely, that the man was the party chiefly
benefited. To keep up this convention it was essential that he should always
seem the suitor. Nothing was therefore considered more shocking to the
proprieties than that a woman should betray a fondness for a man before he had
indicated a desire to marry her. Why, we actually have in our libraries books,
by authors of your day, written for no other purpose than to discuss the
question whether, under any conceivable circumstances, a woman might, without
discredit to her sex, reveal an unsolicited love. All this seems exquisitely
absurd to us, and yet we know that, given your circumstances, the problem might
have a serious side. When for a woman to proffer her love to a man was in effect
to invite him to assume the burden of her support, it is easy to see that pride
and delicacy might well have cheeked the promptings of the heart. When you go
out into our society, Mr. West, you must be prepared to be often
cross-questioned on this point by our young people, who are naturally much
interested in this aspect of old-fashioned manners.«5
    »And so the girls of the twentieth century tell their love.«
    »If they choose,« replied Dr. Leete. »There is no more pretense of a
concealment of feeling on their part than on the part of their lovers. Coquetry
would be as much despised in a girl as in a man. Affected coldness, which in
your day rarely deceived a lover, would