When an Englishwoman makes One-Half of the Bargain The question of the international marriage is always a vital one in cosmopolitan Shanghai and therefore what the English wife of Count von Zeppelin has had to say in one of the recent monthlies on the subject as it concerns Englishwomen will be interesting.
What is it, she asks, that isolates the English and makes of them a people with whom Europeans; and even Americans, have so little in common that the marriage of an Englishwoman with one of them—no matter of Which kind—becomes a venture which it certainly is not when a European woman marries a man of another European nationality—or, indeed, when an American woman marries a European?
She thinks it is the effect of the policy of "splendid isolation" of more than a century which has penetrated so deeply into the English soul as to make any intimate contact—such as marriage—with foreigners a matter of extreme difficulty.
When a woman marries a foreign husband she hes, of course, to adapt herself to entirely strange conditions when she returns with him to his country She has to get used to living her daily life in a foreign language, The strain of this reorientation does not weigh anything like so hard for a woman of European or American nationality. The problem of why this is so is not solved, says Countess von Zeppelin by saying that Europeans and Americans are more adaptable in temperament than are the English. For then neither the European nor the American woman would find marriage with an Englishman any more difficult than with one of themselves, And they do!
"But," she is told, "no one can deny that the English have a gift of understanding for all the peoples who come under their rule! And these people are heterogeneous enough. Look at the Empire! How do you account for that?"
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.