It is, however, not only in her relations to herself and to her sex that a girl's thoughts and feelings tend to be distorted by the ignorance or the false traditions by which she is so often carefully surrounded. Her happiness in marriage, her whole future career, is put in peril. The innocent young woman must always risk much in entering the door of indissoluble marriage; she knows nothing truly of her husband, she knows nothing of the great laws of love, she knows nothing of her own possibilities, and, worse still, she is even ignorant of her ignorance. She runs the risk of losing the game while she is still only beginning to learn it. To some extent that is quite inevitable if we are to insist that a woman should bind herself to marry a man before she has experienced the nature of the forces that marriage may unloose in her. A young girl believes she possesses a certain character; she arranges her future in accordance with that character; she marries. Then, in a considerable proportion of cases (five out of six, according to the novelist Bourget), within a year or even a week, she finds she was completely mistaken in herself and in the man she has married; she discovers within her another self, and that self detests the man to whom she is bound. That is a possible fate against which only the woman who has already been aroused to love is entitled to regard herself as fairly protected. There is, however, a certain kind of protection which it is possible to afford the bride, even without departing from our most conventional conceptions of marriage. We can at least insist that she shall be accurately informed as to the exact nature of her physical relations to her future husband and be safeguarded from the shocks or the disillusions which marriage might otherwise bring. Notwithstanding the decay of prejudices, it is probable that even to-day the majority of women of the so-called educated class marry with only the vaguest and most inaccurate notions, picked up more or less clandestinely, concerning the nature of the sexual relationships. So highly intelligent a woman as Madame Adam has stated that she believed herself bound to marry a man who had kissed her on the mouth, imagining that to be the supreme act of sexual union,[34] and it has frequently happened that women have married sexually inverted persons of their own sex, not always knowingly, but believing them to be men, and never discovering their mistake; it is not long indeed since in America three women were thus successively married to the same woman, none of them apparently ever finding out the real sex of the "husband." "The civilized girl," as Edward Carpenter remarks, "is led to the 'altar' often in uttermost ignorance and misunderstanding of the sacrificial rites about to be consummated." Certainly more rapes have been effected in marriage than outside it.[35] The girl is full of vague and romantic faith in the promises of love, often heightened by the ecstasies depicted in