"Julian had money, and he spent it recklessly. I didn't see how recklessly; I didn't see anything except that he liked me; for he sent me the most beautiful flowers, the most expensive bon-bons and books and magazines. It was a gay winter. Looking back, it seems to me that everybody was eating and drinking, for to-morrow we die. I knew I must fall in love--that had been suggested to me, suggested for years, just as regularly and powerfully as any hypnotist could do it. The whole world was bent on suggesting it to every young girl. You see, the world's selfish. It wants to live, and it can't live unless the young girl says Yea. And it can't leave it, or it thinks it can't, to Nature working in a certain number in her own good time. It must cheat and beguile and train the girl--every girl--every girl! I tell you, I didn't know any more about marriage than I did about life on the planet Mars! I was packing my trunks for a voyage--and I didn't know where I was going. I didn't know anything about it. No one offered me a Baedeker.... It was orange blossoms and a veil and a ring--and I didn't know what either meant--and felicitations and presents and 'Hear the golden wedding-bells!' and 'They lived happily ever after.' Julian was handsome and lavish and popular, and his family were all right, and if he had been gay he would now settle down; and father and mother were satisfied, and people said I was to be envied.... I married at eighteen. I hadn't read much. I didn't know anything. No one told me anything. Maybe the world thinks that if it tells, the young girl would say No. "We went on a wedding-trip. I suppose sometimes a wedding-trip isn't a mockery. I'm not so bitter as not to know that often it isn't so--that often it is all right. I'm not denying love, and clean men and considerate. I'm not denying hosts of marriages that without any very high ideal are fit and decent enough. I'm not denying noble lovers--men and women--and noble marriages. I'm only saying that the other kind, the kind that's not fit nor clean nor decent and anything but noble, is so frequent and commonplace that it is rather laughable and altogether sardonic and devilish to kneel down and worship as we do the Institution of Staying Together--Staying Together at any price, even when evidently the only clean thing to do would be to Stay Apart.... My wedding-trip lasted four months. I went eighteen, and I came back old as I am now--older than I am now; for I have grown younger these last two years. My marriage wasn't the noble kind. It was the kind you couldn't make noble. It wasn't even the decent, low-order type. It was a sink and a pit and a horror."