always felt, loved each and every human creature.  So it was that he took this mystery of food, which by eating became part of ourselves, as the symbol of the most intense human love, the most intense Divine love.  Some day, perhaps, love will be so understood by all that this sacrament will cease to be a superstition, a bone of contention, an ‘article’ of the church, and become, in all simplicity, a symbol of pure love.”

While in men it is possible to trace a tendency to inflict pain, or the simulacrum of pain, on the women they love, it is still easier to trace in women a delight in experiencing physical pain when inflicted by a lover, and an eagerness to accept subjection to his will.  Such a tendency is certainly normal.  To abandon herself to her lover, to be able to rely on his physical strength and mental resourcefulness, to be swept out of herself and beyond the control of her own will, to drift idly in delicious submission to another and stronger will—­this is one of the commonest aspirations in a young woman’s intimate love-dreams.  In our own age these aspirations most often only find their expression in such dreams.  In ages when life was more nakedly lived, and emotion more openly expressed, it was easier to trace this impulse.  In the thirteenth century we have found Marie de France—­a French poetess living in England who has been credited with “an exquisite sense of the generosities and delicacy of the heart,” and whose work was certainly highly appreciated in the best circles and among the most cultivated class of her day—­describing as a perfect, wise, and courteous knight a man who practically commits a rape on a woman who has refused to have anything to do with him, and, in so acting, he wins her entire love.  The savage beauty of New Caledonia furnishes no better illustration of the fascination of force, for she, at all events, has done her best to court the violence she undergoes.  In Middleton’s Spanish Gypsy we find exactly the same episode, and the unhappy Portuguese nun wrote:  “Love me for ever and make me suffer still more.”  To find in literature more attenuated examples of the same tendency is easy.  Shakespeare, whose observation so little escaped, has seldom depicted the adult passion of a grown woman, but in the play which he has mainly devoted to this subject he makes Cleopatra refer to “amorous pinches,” and she says in the end:  “The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired.”  “I think the Sabine woman enjoyed being carried off like that,” a woman remarked in front of Rubens’s “Rape of the Sabines,” confessing that such a method of love-making appealed strongly to herself, and it is probable that the majority of women would be prepared to echo that remark.