Not, assuredly, that all this led the young ladies to gild the pill or modify their first conception of marriage; on the contrary, the more they considered the matter, the more they weighed, in as just a balance as men, the advantages against the disadvantages. Very often, princesses of the blood royal loved simple noblemen, or even men of lower rank: they never married them. It was too well known that love and marriage were two different terms, and that certain old books, preserved in the libraries, maintained the theory that married women, “possessing what maids seem to seek,” should remain at home and never again exhibit themselves for the pleasure of others, or even for their own. Formerly a girl of ten years, repressed and secluded, could picture marriage as a source of “liberty and pleasure”; and these blessings once secured are sedulously guarded. You must be grateful to men for giving you their name and fortune, of course; but some men are so odd! It is impossible to take too many precautions. Many an excellent young man, pleasant enough to all appearance, may turn out an insufferable husband. And so it was with mingled prudence and dilettantism that these fair sixteenth-century Americans set out in quest of the Golden Fleece. Little hampered by parents who thought their whole duty was done when they paid over the dowry, they learnt how pleasant it was to take life into their own hands, to show themselves in society, to talk, laugh, dance, frolic—live, in a word, without a by-your-leave to anyone. And yet the Latin delicacy and grace betray themselves in various prejudices: to practise archery, to pad themselves for a pass with the foils, or merely to have their photographs taken as naiads—these resources were not yet open to them! The poor things could only triumph by their charm and enthusiasm, quite in the Latin way, at the risk of rubbing off a little of their bloom here and there.