beyond seventy, though some, whose strength is not all sorrow and
weakness even then, do not reach it till much later. If Shakespeare
had dared he would have described with poetic fire the age of the girl
who never marries. But this is a digression. The point is that the
truth about marriage is out, since the modern spinster has shown the
sisterhood how to live, and an amazing number of women look upon
wedlock as a foolish thing, vainly imagined, never necessary, and
rarely amusing.

The state of perpetual unsanctified virginity, however, is not for
poor girls, nor for operatic singers, nor for kings' daughters, none
of whom, for various reasons, can live, or are allowed to live,
without husbands. Unless she be a hunchback, an unmarried royal
princess is almost as great an exception as a white raven or a cat
without a tail; a primadonna without a husband alive, dead, or
divorced, is hardly more common; and poor girls marry to live. But
give a modern young woman a decent social position, with enough money
for her wants and an average dose of assurance, and she becomes so
fastidious in the choice of a mate that no man is good enough for
her till she is too old to be good enough for any man. Even then the
chances are that she will not deeply regret her lost opportunities,
and though her married friends will tell her that she has made a
mistake, half of them will envy her in secret, the other half will not
pity her much, and all will ask her to their dinner-parties, because a
woman without a husband is such a convenience.

In respect to her art Margarita da Cordova was in all ways a thorough
artist, endowed with the gifts, animated by the feelings, and
afflicted with the failings that usually make up an artistic nature.
But Margaret Donne was a sound and healthy English girl who had been