Masculine women are always condemned to bury their unwomanly proclivities with their spinster-selves, unless they are very rich, or unless they can find a correspondingly effeminate man who wishes to neutralise his abnormalities in his children by marrying a spouse whose faults are an excess in the opposite direction. In such a case a virago may possibly even inspire Romantic Love, _mirabile dictu!_ An ugly woman, on the other hand, need never despair of finding a husband; she has at least eight chances of getting married. In the first place, she may, like a masculine woman, inspire true Love in a man whose faults are the opposite of hers; secondly, she may fall in love with a man of faultless proportions, and while in Love her features will be so transfigured and beautified that he cannot help returning her Love; thirdly, she may meet a man who, from want of æsthetic taste, prefers a chromo to a Titian; or a fourth, who would rather marry an amiable and useful ugly girl than a spoiled beauty. Wealth and social position supply two more resources. Accident may favour her, through the absence of prettier rivals, giving no opportunities for odious comparisons; and, finally, she may meet an elderly bachelor who has wearied of his single blessedness and longs for double strife. As for those Old Maids who are neither ugly nor masculine, some of them are quondam coquettes who practised their arts just one season too long and “got left” in consequence; others are girls whom silly methods of chaperonage or ill-luck have prevented from making the acquaintance of men whom they could have respected and loved; so that it is often the most refined and intelligent women who are thus doomed to remain single because they are unwilling to marry beneath their station, socially or intellectually. They form that class of whom De Quincey says, that they “combine more intelligence, cultivation, and thoughtfulness than any other in Europe—the class of unmarried women above twenty-five—an increasing class, women who, from mere dignity of character, have renounced all prospects of conjugal and parental life rather than descend into habits unsuitable to their birth.” Women who are too ugly to inspire Love may nevertheless feel proud of being a class of Vestal Virgins who serve the cause of Love by abstaining from adding to the number of unattractive people in the world by hereditary transmission. On the other hand, Old Maids who are blessed with beauty, owe it to the cause of Love to make every effort, consistent with feminine modesty, to get married. Not only because their children will be beautiful, but because a woman who never marries can never experience the two emotions which do more than any others to ennoble and mature the feminine mind—conjugal and maternal love.