For instance, when the ordinary middle-class person of the present day hears it said that spinsters are abnormal, cannot help acting abnormally, and must therefore constitute an abnormal influence in society, he finds it difficult to resist the temptation to object indignantly: “Oh, but it isn’t their fault if they are spinsters—why say such hard things about them?” It never occurs to such a person that the business of discovering the facts about a certain phenomenon is not an undertaking that can be trammelled by considerations either of gallantry or drawing-room etiquette, nor is it embarked upon with the object of apportioning praise or blame. The contention that it is not the spinster’s fault that she is a spinster, therefore, is no more relevant to an inquiry into spinsterhood, and ought no more to influence us in the conclusions at which we arrive concerning spinsterhood, than the fact that the germ of tuberculosis is not responsible for being the germ of tuberculosis ought to influence us in our inquiry into its relation to pulmonary phthisis. I am quite prepared to admit without further ado that there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of noble and eminently desirable women in England to-day who have remained spinsters from deliberate choice. I have no doubt that if I had been a woman and had entertained anything approximately like my present opinion of modern men, I too would have remained a spinster, maybe from sheer nausea.[102] The majority of modern men are so very much below even a modest idea of what man should be, they have been so much besotted and debilitated through generations of unmanly labours and occupations, that it is not merely conceivable that many women should prefer not to condescend, it is almost inconceivable that any woman can be found who imagines she has found her match. Let us clearly define, however, what we have set ourselves out to investigate. We have not undertaken in this chapter to show the multifarious reasons why a woman may elect spinsterhood as her rôle in life. We have undertaken the more important task of discovering her relation to society when once the rôle of spinster has been assumed. Whether she has remained a spinster from deliberate choice, therefore, or whether she is a spinster owing to the loss of her fiancé at sea or in a railway accident, matters but little. The fact is that, as the result of circumstances which may or may not have been beyond her control, she has remained unmarried. As a spinster she will inevitably develop characteristics more or less true to type. These characteristics will exercise some influence on her own life and that of others. It is this influence that we propose to consider, irrespective of the causes which brought the spinster herself into being.