“You must remember,” said the Professor, her eyes glowing solemnly, and with the tone of being consciously judicial and at a great altitude, “you must remember certain facts about the selecting--the pairing--instinct. Now, in the case of man it is necessary that the selecting instinct be special and not general. So long as a man permits himself to think of woman as an abstraction, continues to admire ideals of womanhood and does not seek or is not drawn to seek charms in a particular woman, he is likely to remain a bachelor. His instinct must be, and has become by centuries of custom, an instinct for specific selection. On the other hand, the instinct of specific selection so favorable to the man, is distinctly unfavorable to the woman--that is to say, unfavorable to the woman if we accept marriage as her natural destination. A woman who grows up with the habit of mind which predisposes her to search for a particular man, is likely to remain unmarried. To favor pairing in her case, the instinct toward marriage must be general rather than specific. A woman does not select a mate from all the men in the world, as a man is supposed to select a mate from all the women in the world. She selects from among those who ask her, or, at most, from the group which she may have attracted into debatable ground.” “But--” I interposed. “Wait a moment,” pursued the Professor firmly. “This is not to say that a woman has no actual right to a privilege of selecting quite as definite as that permitted to man. It simply is saying that under present customs an effort toward specific selection on her part is not favorable to marriage. There may, and probably will, come a time when custom will permit to woman a more specific selection, without hazard as to the chance of marriage, and without loss of status on her part in any resulting marriage.” “I am glad,” I said, “that you have touched that point, for of course woman could not afford to be specific at the loss of prestige. It seems to me that the present system gives an immense advantage to women, since, in any matrimonial emergency she may always retort, ‘Nobody asked you, sir.’ Man’s initiative gives her the benefit of the doubt in all after judgments from the world; for if man selects her, and she accepts him or yields to his selection, and there should possibly be error, plainly, as with Mark Twain’s mistaken lynchers, the joke is on him. She cannot escape responsibility, but her responsibility always is lesser, and all the privileges of reservation are on her side.”