of holiness that they submitted willingly to their agony and praised God for the sternness of his judgment.  This poem gave me decided physical pleasure, yet I know that if my hand were held in a fire for five minutes I should feel nothing but the pain of the burning.  To get the feeling of pleasure, too, I must, for the moment, revert to my old religious beliefs and my old notion that mere suffering has an elevating influence; one’s emotions are greatly modified by one’s beliefs.  When I was about fifteen I invented a game which I played with a younger sister, in which we were supposed to be going through a process of discipline and preparation for heaven after death.  Each person was supposed to enter this state on dying and to pass successively into the charge of different angels named after the special virtues it was their function to instill.  The last angel was that of Love, who governed solely by the quality whose name he bore.  In the lower stages, we were under an angel called Severity who prepared us by extreme harshness and by exacting implicit obedience to arbitrary orders for the acquirement of later virtues.  Our duties were to superintend the weather, paint the sunrise and sunset, etc., the constant work involved exercising us in patience and submission.  The physical pleasure came in in inventing and recounting to each other our day’s work and the penalties and hardships we had been subjected to.  We never told each other that we got any physical pleasure out of this, and I cannot therefore be sure that my sister did so; I only imagine she did because she entered so heartily into the spirit of the game.  I could get as much pleasure by imagining myself the angel and inflicting the pain, under the conditions mentioned; but my sister did not like this so much, as she then had no companion in subjection.  I could not, however, thus reverse my feelings in regard to a man, as it would appear to me unnatural, and, besides, the greater physical strength is essential in the superior position.  I can, however, by imagining myself a man, sometimes get pleasure in conceiving myself as educating and disciplining a woman by severe measures.  There is, however, no real cruelty in this idea, as I always imagine her liking it.

“I only get pleasure in the idea of a woman submitting herself to pain and harshness from the man she loves when the following conditions are fulfilled:  1.  She must be absolutely sure of the man’s love. 2.  She must have perfect confidence in his judgment. 3.  The pain must be deliberately inflicted, not accidental. 4.  It must be inflicted in kindness and for her own improvement, not in anger or with any revengeful feelings, as that would spoil one’s ideal of the man. 5.  The pain must not be excessive and must be what when we were children we used to call a ‘tidy’ pain; i.e., there must be no mutilation, cutting, etc. 6.  Last, one would have to feel very sure of one’s own influence over the man.  So