These views were so much misunderstood when they appeared in magazine form that I have felt obliged to emphasize the differences between the still primitive woman and the woman who is the product of the higher civilization.  One young socialist, who looked quite strong enough to support a family, asked me if I did not think it better for a girl to support herself than to be the slave of a man’s lust and bear innumerable children, whether she wished for them or not, children to whose support society contributed nothing.  But why be a man’s slave, and why have more children than you can support?  We live in the enlightened twentieth century, when there is precious little about anything that women do not know, and if they do not they are such hopeless fools that they should be in the State Institutions.  The time has passed for women to talk of being men’s slaves in any sense, except in the economic.  There are still sweatshops and there is still speeding up in factories, because society is still far from perfect, but if a woman privately is a man’s slave to-day it is because she is the slave of herself as well.

VI

Personally, although nothing has ever tempted me to marry a second time, I am very glad I married in my early youth, not only because matrimony enables a potential writer to see life from many more viewpoints than if she remains blissfully single, but because I was sheltered from all harsh contacts with the world.  No one was ever less equipped by nature for domesticity and all the responsibilities of everyday life, and if circumstances had so ordered that I had not blundered into matrimony before twenty-four-or-five, no doubt I never should have married at all.

But at that time—­I was home on a vacation from boarding-school, and had had none of that illuminating experience known as being “out,” I did no reasoning whatever.  On the other hand I was far too mentally undeveloped and arrogant to be capable at that tender age of falling deeply in love.  My future husband proposed six times (we were in a country house).  I was flattered, divided between the ambition to graduate brilliantly and to be an author with no further loss of time, and wear becoming caps and trains to my frocks.  On the other hand I wanted neither a husband particularly nor to go back to school, for I felt that as my grandfather had one of the best libraries in California nothing could be more pleasant or profitable than to finish my education in it undisturbed.  Nevertheless, quite abruptly I made up my mind and married; and, if the truth were known, my reasons and impulses were probably as intelligent as those of the average young girl who knows the world only through books and thinks it has little more to teach her.  My life had been objective and sheltered.  If forced to earn my living at sixteen no doubt the contacts impossible to escape would soon have given me a real maturity of judgment and I should have grown to love, jealously, my freedom.