No one who lives in the world at all can fail to understand that in every human relationship, and supremely in this one, there must be much mutual accommodation, much give and take, a great gentleness to every claim made in the name of love.  All I am concerned to do here is to help to clear up misunderstandings.  It is no claim that I put forward that the woman’s point of view is superior to the man’s:  merely that they seem to me a little different.

A man who is conscious of jarring, who finds himself a little at cross-purposes with the woman he loves, and yet knows that the jarring is merely superficial and the love profound, may easily feel that to ask and offer once more the supreme expression of that love is the best way to transcend the temporary lack of sympathy and restore love to its right place and true proportion.  Who shall say that he is wrong?  Is it not certain that the expression of love does intensify and deepen love?  Is not a sacrament the means of grace as well as its symbol.

Yet let him be warned.  He may easily seem to his wife to be contenting himself with the symbol without the reality, the body without the soul.  If she understands him, she may go with him.  If she does not, no yielding on her part—­no physical passion that he may arouse—­will quite stifle the protest which tells her that she suffers spiritual violation.  Do you remember the cry of Julie in “The Three Daughters of M. Dupont”? “It is a nightly warfare in which I am always defeated.”  That her physical nature is suborned to aid in the conquest only increases for her the sense of degradation.

This difference in point of view affects the relations of men and women far more widely than is realized, since it is apt to arise wherever the physical comes in at all—­and where does it not?  Not a touch only, or a caress, but all deliberate appeal to sexual feeling becomes more difficult to women as they grow more civilized.  It is perhaps difficult for a man to realize, in the atmosphere of giggles and whispers with which sex is surrounded in the theatre, the novel and the press, how revolting it becomes to modern women to be expected to use such means for “holding” a lover, or extorting concessions from one who is “held.”  It was much easier, I suppose, when women did not understand what they were about.  One sees that to such women it is comparatively easy to-day.  And the position is complicated by inheritance of the age-old conviction that a woman is supremely woman when she can bend a man by precisely these means.  But the revolt is here.  And—­for the sake of clearness—­what I am concerned to show is that a woman is not necessarily asexual or cold because she will not use an appeal to sexuality in order to get what she wants.  She may have all the “temperament” in the world, but she has also self-respect, and she revolts from the idea of exploiting for advantage what should be sacramental.

I believe that a better understanding on this point would save not only great disasters but an infinity of small jars and strains, and if I have put the woman’s point of view at some length it is partly because I understand it better, but chiefly because it is comparatively “modern” to admit that she has a point of view to put.