There is always the doubt as to whether the seeker may be the one of all the world to find the inmost places in her heart. Taste and temperament may be akin, position and purpose in full accord, and yet the vital touch may be lacking. Sometimes, in the after-years, it may be found by two who seek for it patiently together, but too often dissonance grows into discord and estrangement.
The march of civilisation has done away with the odium which was formerly the portion of the unattached woman. It is no disgrace to be a spinster, and apparently it is fitting and proper to be an old maid, since so many of them have "Mrs." on their cards, and since there are so many narrow-minded and critical men who fully deserve the appellation.
There is no use in saying that any particular girl is a spinster from necessity rather than choice. One has but to look at the peculiar specimens of womankind who have married, to be certain that there is no one on the wide earth who could not do so if she chose.
"A Discipline"
Some people are fond of alluding to marriage as "a discipline," and sometimes a grey-haired matron will volunteer the information that "the first years of marriage are anything but happy." To one who has hitherto regarded it from a different point of view, the training-school idea is not altogether attractive.
Men and women who have been through it very seldom hold to their first opinions. It is considered as a business arrangement, a social contrivance, sometimes as an easy way to make money, but by very few as the highest form of happiness.
Small Extravagances
The consolations of spinsterhood are mainly negative, but the minus sign has its proper place in the personal equation. "The other woman" does not exist for the spinster, save as a shadowy possibility. She is not asked what she did with the nickel which was given her day before yesterday, and thus forced to make confession of small extravagances, or to reply, with such sweetness as she may muster, that she bought a lot on a fashionable street with part of it, and has the remainder out at interest. She does not have to stay at home from social affairs because she has no escort, for the law has not apportioned to her a solitary man, and she has a liberty of choice which is not accorded her married friend.
She is not subjected to the humiliation of asking a man for money to pay for his own food, his own service, and even his own laundry bill. She can usually earn her own, if the gods have not awarded her sufficient gold, and there is no money which a woman spends so happily as that which she has earned herself.
The "career" lies before her, and she has only to choose the thing for which she is best fitted, and work her way upward from the lowest ranks to the position of a star of the first magnitude. Opportunity is but another name for health, obstacles make firm stepping-stones, and that which is dearly bought is by far the sweetest in the end. Of course there are "strings to pull," but no one needs them. Success is more lasting if it is won in an open field, without favour, and in spite of generous measures of it bestowed upon the opposition.