The sexes now meet with the ease of perfect equals, suitors 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.