The defects of the system were not at once perceived, though these were developing in women a thirst like that of Tantalus, exciting a state of restless agitation and nervousness, which the old doctors of Gerson’s school professed to guard against and which Vivès fancied he had avoided by directing their activity towards a definite end. People were struck only with the immediate advantages. Erasmus uttered heart-rending plaints about the little girls he was ever meeting in the Low Countries, poor ignorant little creatures, thick-lipped, podgy, stuck on high heels so as to appear grown-up, over-dressed, rigged out with a load of ribbons and feathers, with all the airs of innocent little baggages: “I ask myself,” he cries, “if these are dolls, or monkeys, or girls.” How he would have liked to tear off all that flummery, and fill their beaks with a little Greek or French, or even a little Latin! A simple fellow said to Margaret: “Men and women have different functions, but their virtues ought to be equal.” He was making a mistake; the virtues of women ought to be superior. But if women believe that it is their mission to rule instead of to obey, or, at any rate, that the obedience they owe has well-defined limits; if they are no longer the burden which a father used to get rid of as soon as possible, and which a husband received as his absolute property, body and soul; if they desire to count for something; if marriage is regarded as the union of two persons equally free, as the close and not the commencement of education; if the wife is no longer the pupil of her husband, and it is considered better for her to come to him fully instructed: then a very natural consequence will inevitably ensue, whatever may be thought or said: women will marry later, will insist on exercising a choice as men do, and on laying down their own conditions: they will in this way imagine that they have greater freedom and are probably making a better bargain, for they have become women of sense. The fortunate discovery was made that Lycurgus, in the main, considered twenty years the best age for marriage: with the result that in the most aristocratic families, and those most swayed by tradition, they waited with the most perfect resignation until the seventeenth year,[89] while ladies of exceptional courage held that it was “modern style” to marry much later. Margaret of France was not married till she was thirty-seven. This reform, important as it was, did not end in making what we should regard as a happy girlhood possible. However the Italian theory might wreathe life with roses and preserve a happy ignorance of physiological problems, it was not easy for a French girl to reach that point and retain this beautiful innocence, surrounded as she was by people who called a spade a spade, idealising things no more than in the days when she was married as soon as born.