But the main reason why women don’t marry is obviously because men don’t ask them. Most women will accept when a sufficiently pleasing man offers them a sufficiently congenial life. If the offers they receive fall below a certain standard, then they prefer to remain single, wistfully hoping, no doubt, that the right man may come along before it is too late. The preservation of the imaginative faculty in women, to which I have previously alluded, doubtless accounts for many spinsters. It must also be remembered that the more educated women become, the less likely they are to marry for marrying’s sake as their grandmothers did. Then there are a few women, quite a small section, who, unless they can realise their ideal in its entirety, will not be content with second best. By an irony of fate, it happens that these are often the noblest of their sex. Yet another small section remain single from an honest dislike of marriage and its duties. It is perhaps not too severe to say that a woman who has absolutely no vocation for wifehood and motherhood must be a degenerate, and so lacking in the best feminine instincts as to deserve the reproach of being ‘sexless.’ This type is apparently increasing! I shall deal with it further in Part IV. Then there are those--I should not like to make a guess at their number--who will marry _any_ man, however undesirable and uncongenial, rather than be left ‘withering on the stalk.’ It is an acutely humiliating fact that there exists no man too ugly, too foolish, too brutal, too conceited and too vile to find a wife. _Any_ man can find _some_ woman to wed him. In this connection, one recalls the famous cook, who, when condoled with on the defection of a lover, replied: ‘It don’t matter; thank God I can love any man!’ One cannot help being amused by the serious articles on this subject in feminine journals. We are gravely told that women don’t marry nowadays because they price their liberty too high, because those who have money prefer to be independent and enjoy life, and those who have none prefer bravely wringing a living from the world to being a man’s slave, a mere drudge, entirely engrossed in housekeeping, etc., etc.; and so on--pages of it! All this may possibly be true of a very small portion of the community, but the uncontrovertible fact remains that the principal reason for woman’s spinsterhood is man’s indifference.