“He now began to make the practical acquaintance of a woman—­and one who, in impulses, temper, manner, and habit of thought, differed toto caelo from the girls he had known in his old home.  Her sexual nature was ripe and developed, and it is lucky that the engagement was of short duration, or the strain and anticipation of that time might have been injurious to the health of both.  As usual, in his outward relations toward women, so toward his fiancee, he was prepared for chaste caresses only.  This, however, did not suffice for her hot and passionate nature.  They went as far as possible short of actual coitus.

“After a few months, however, the marriage took place, and, at first, this brought him bitter disappointment and seemed to confirm his worst fears.  He found himself quite unable to have pleasure or satisfactory coitus; quite incapable, with any erection that he could command, of introducing his well-developed penis into his wife’s extremely narrow and contracted vagina.  About a fortnight after the marriage, however, on his return from their short wedding tour, he felt much stronger and copulated with her, especially in the early mornings, so satisfactorily that she soon found herself with child.  Coitus now began to be much more pleasurable for him, but to his wife still attended with pain.

“After nine months of married life, the child, the only offspring of the marriage, a healthy girl, was born.  The stress of this time, the upsetting of his wife’s health, her nervous breakdown and consequently uncertain temper, seemed for a period of nearly two years effectually to repress any sexual desire in the husband, and this period is perhaps the chastest of his life.  Desire seemed to be the one thing absent.  The revulsion of feeling in his wife was remarkable.  The erstwhile amorous fiancee, who could hardly wait until marriage to test her lover, became now the wife and mother who hardly wished to be touched by her husband.

“Her health, however, gradually improved and a more normal state of affairs was brought about, which has continued to the present day, broken only by periods of abstention, chiefly caused by the attacks of anemia and menstrual irregularities from which his wife suffers from time to time.  Ordinarily, he enjoys coitus once or twice in the month, hardly oftener, taking one month with another.  At one time he exemplified in his own person the saying omne animal post coitum triste, but now happily this depression of spirits is rarely felt.  Sometimes he has felt a depression of spirits, a general discontentedness, before experiencing a strong erection; in these cases coitus has cleared his spirits.  He would naturally look upon coitus as an evacuation, although he recognizes the imperfectness of that view.  For one thing he is constantly sorry, viz., that the act gives no pleasure to his wife, and that he has never been able to induce a crisis with