“The kernel of the whole matter is the delusion of being singled out and loved by a person of the other sex, who regularly belongs to a higher social class.  And it should be noted that the love felt by the patient toward this person is a romantic, ecstatic, but entirely ‘Platonic’ affection.”

I have among my notes a remarkable case, relating to that most awful of diseases that can befall a woman—­nymphomania.[43] The patient relates: 

“I have also noticed that when my affections are aroused, they counteract animal passion.  I could never love a man because he was a man.  My tendency is to worship the good I find in friends.  I feel just the same toward those of my own sex.  If they show any regard for me, the touch of a hand has power to take away all morbid feelings.”

A MODERN SENTIMENT

There are all sorts and conditions of love.  To those who have known only the primitive (sensual) sort, the conditions described in the foregoing pages will seem strange and fantastic if not fictitious—­that is, the products of the writers’ imaginations.  Fantastic they are, no doubt, and romantic, but that they are real I can vouch for by my own experience whenever I was in love, which happened several times.  When I was a youth of seventeen I fell in love with a beautiful, black-eyed young woman, a Spanish-American of Californian stock.  She was married, and I am afraid she was amused at my mad infatuation.  Did I try to flirt with her?  A smile, a glance of her eyes, was to me the seventh heaven beyond which there could be no other.  I would not have dared to touch her hand, and the thought of kissing her was as much beyond my wildest flights of fancy as if she had been a real goddess.  To me she was divine, utterly unapproachable by mortal.  Every day I used to sit in a lonely spot of the forest and weep; and when she went away I felt as if the son had gone out and all the world were plunged into eternal darkness.

Such is romantic love—­a supersensual feeling of crystalline purity from which all gross matter has been distilled.  But the love that includes this ingredient is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand years old, and not to be found among savages, barbarians, or Orientals.  To them, as the perusal of past and later chapters must convince the reader, it is inconceivable that a woman should serve any other than sensual and utilitarian purposes.  The whole story is told in what Dodge says of the Indians, who, “animal-like, approach a woman only to make love to her”; and of the squaws who do not dare even go with a beau to a dance, or go a short distance from camp, without taking precautions against rape—­precautions without which they “would not be safe for an instant” (210, 213).

PERSIANS, TURKS, AND HINDOOS

We shall read later on of the obscene talk and sights that poison the minds of boys and girls among Indians, Polynesians, etc., from their infancy; in which respect Orientals are not much better than Hurons and Botocudos.  “The Persian child,” writes Mrs. Bishop (I., 218),