more difficult than most people seem to suppose, to obtain quite precise and definite data concerning the absence of either voluptas or libido in a woman.  Even if we accept the statement of the woman who asserts that she has either or both, the statement of their absence is by no means equally conclusive and final.  As even Adler—­who discusses this question fully and has very pronounced opinions about it—­admits, there are women who stoutly deny the existence of any sexual feelings until such feelings are actually discovered.[158] Some of the most marked characteristics of the sexual impulse in women, moreover,—­its association with modesty, its comparatively late development, its seeming passivity, its need of stimulation,—­all combine to render difficult the final pronouncement that a woman is sexually frigid.  Most significant of all in this connection is the complexity of the sexual apparatus in women and the corresponding psychic difficulty—­based on the fundamental principle of sexual selection—­of finding a fitting mate.  The fact that a woman is cold with one man or even with a succession of men by no means shows that she is not apt to experience sexual emotions; it merely shows that these men have not been able to arouse them.  “I recall two very striking cases,” a distinguished gynecologist, the late Dr. Engelmann, of Boston, wrote to me, “of very attractive young married women—­one having had a child, the other a miscarriage—­who were both absolutely cold to their husbands, as told me by both husband and wife.  They could not understand desire or passion, and would not even believe that it existed.  Yet, both these women with other men developed ardent passion, all the stronger perhaps because it had been so long latent.”  In such cases it is scarcely necessary to invoke Adler’s theory of a morbid inhibition, or “foreign body in consciousness,” which has to be overcome.  We are simply in the presence of the natural fact that the female throughout nature not only requires much loving, but is usually fastidious in the choice of a lover.  In the human species this natural fact is often disguised and perverted.  Women are not always free to choose the man whom they would prefer as a lover, nor even free to find out whether the man they prefer sexually fits them; they are, moreover, very often extremely ignorant of the whole question of sex, and the victims of the prejudice and false conventions they have been taught.  On the one hand, they are driven into an unnatural primness and austerity; on the other hand, they rebound to an equally unnatural facility or even promiscuity.  Thus it happens that the men who find that a large number of women are not so facile as they themselves are, and as they have found a large number of women to be, rush to the conclusion that women tend to be “sexually anesthetic.”  If we wish to be accurate, it is very doubtful whether we can assert that a woman is ever absolutely without the aptitude for sexual satisfaction.[159] She may unquestionably