And what of the isolated young girl? Her case seems to me even more sorrowful and piteous. Half of life is a sealed book to her. She has scarcely any ideas that are not delusions about love and the opposite sex, and the most important offices of her being. Her natural impulses have been suppressed, stunted, and perverted, and her physical health is probably feebler than that of the dissipated young man. She marries late, dazed with joy that her hour has come at last, and frequently awakes in the first year of marriage to the truth that she knew little about men in general, and not nearly enough about the man she has wedded; that she was wofully inexperienced and ignorant, and that Respectability condemns her to drain the bitter cup of disappointment to the dregs, to drain it with composure and a smiling face to the world. She was not allowed to mix freely with men. All her ideas of male human nature are derived from mawkish novels and story books, often written by women as ill-informed as herself. Many women have confessed to me that they did not understand men till they married one, and many men have said the same concerning women. How, then, can we lessen the chances of drawing the wrong card in the great lottery of marriage? Certainly not by the sequestration of youths and maidens, for that is one of the chief causes of unsuccessful unions. Grundyism and Respectability must be set at defiance, and boys and girls in adolescence allowed to form companionships with each other. The artificial barriers between them must be broken down; the old stupid inhibitions rescinded, and a wholesome association not only permitted, but by every means encouraged. Education in life through the fellowship and the interchange of ideas between the sexes is one safeguard against wreckage in the perilous journey of matrimony. Discoursing upon the "eternal feminine," Schopenhauer says: "Individual and partial exceptions do not alter the fact that women are, and will always remain, the most thorough and incurable Philistines.... Their domination and influence ruins modern society.... The essentially European lady is a being who ought to have no existence at all; there ought, on the other hand, to be housewives and girls who hope to become such, and who are, in consequence, brought up to domesticity by subordination. Just because there are _ladies_ in Europe, women of a lower grade, who form, therefore, the great majority of the sex, are much more unhappy than they are in the East."