The romantic youth who imagines that most women are more sentimental and romantic than himself, discovers his error when he becomes a lover, and is received as a suitor in the family of his inamorata. He finds the Little Muddleton Road folk extremely practical and respectable. Materfamilias may possibly have been slightly tinged with romance and poetry in her teens; but at fifty she is a slave to Respectability, and she teaches her daughters, in season and out, that they must, before all else, be "Respectable members of society." Is it a matter for wonder? Naturally, the romantic youth puzzles over this shrewd, business-like phase of woman's character; but he forgets that "human beings, cramped under worse than South Sea Isle taboo," develop astuteness in order to survive. You cannot expect women who have been fenced around by Respectability and restricted to the back parlour and the kitchen, to be wild, free, natural creatures, and nymphs of the woodland. We ought not to have imprisoned them in this way at the beginning. By this time, alas! the majority of them appear to hug their fetters. The black shadow of the plague of Respectability is over love and the relations of the sexes, and women suffer more than men from this terrible blight. Respectability isolates the sexes before marriage, and only allows them to discover each other's idiosyncracies, caprices, and foibles when they are inseparably united ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist, to hobble on through life, and pretend that they are enjoying the penance. I do not say that the shackles _always_ gall. It is almost a sheer question of chance if they do not. For this fearful uncertainty Respectability is much to blame. Girls are immured and guarded, like vestal virgins of old; there is no wholesome widespread social commingling of the sexes. Boys are free; but what is their liberty worth to them, when girls are watched, chaperoned, and secluded at the very age when their society is most sought by the youth of the opposite sex? This nunnery system is practically restricted to the middle-class Respectables. What is its effect upon the morals and the weal of the order? Most disastrous. The young man, in a very large number of instances, gains his knowledge of womankind among the flashy, flighty, and even more undesirable specimens of the sex. He meets the Little Muddleton Road girls at parties occasionally, but if he walks home from chapel with one of them, Paterfamilias or Mamma intervenes, and cuts short the friendship, or they want to know the young fellow's "intentions" towards Ethel. His own parents tell him he is too youthful, or too poor, to think of wooing yet; and I have even known mothers who excluded all girls from the house for fear that their sons should fall in love prematurely.