They find themselves face to face with a fact; what is done cannot be undone, nor can it be done over again. The transaction is completed: all that remains is to pay the price. Once they can think themselves quit of that obligation, the problem of liberty will present itself to them too, though not, of course, under the forbidding aspects of those ideas of divorce, remarriage, polygamy, that are floating in the air. In the eyes of the women marriage kept its character as a sacrament: the view that it was a contract freely entered into between their husbands and themselves appeared hard to accept, for several reasons. In the first place, little faith was put in that system of social contracts of which we are so enamoured to-day. Life was incomprehensible without a large admixture of fatalism. We are not, we cannot be, parties to a contract when we come into the world; but certain laws have already had their way with us, and to them we continue subject. In marriage, one of those laws, there is nothing irrational in the accessory notion of a contract, and yet, even in marriage, with every imaginable liberty of choice, the real substance of a contract is not found. Is not this contract specially complicated with latent circumstances of time, place, motive, which act unequally upon the two parties? In its very nature it involves so much that is unknown, so much that is fortuitous, admits of so many causes of error and instability, that it barely comes into the category of reasonable presumptions, much less of contracts.