woman smell the flowers she likes best, he remarks, and she will close her eyes, breathe deeply, and, if very sensitive, tremble all over, presenting an intimate picture which otherwise she never shows, except perhaps to her lover.  He mentions a lady who said:  “I sometimes feel such pleasure in smelling flowers that I seem to be committing a sin."[74] It is really the case that in many persons—­usually, if not exclusively, women—­the odor of flowers produces not only a highly pleasurable, but a distinctly and specifically sexual, effect.  I have met with numerous cases in which this effect was well marked.  It is usually white flowers with heavy, penetrating odors which exert this influence.  Thus, one lady (who is similarly affected by various perfumes, forget-me-nots, ylang-ylang, etc.) finds that a number of flowers produce on her a definite sexual effect, with moistening of the pudenda.  This effect is especially produced by white flowers like the gardenia, tuberose, etc.  Another lady, who lives in India, has a similar experience with flowers.  She writes:  A scent to cause me sexual excitement must be somewhat heavy and penetrating.  Nearly all white flowers so affect me and many Indian flowers with heavy, almost pungent scents. (All the flower scents are quite unconnected with me with any individual.) Tuberose, lilies of the valley, and frangipani flowers have an almost intoxicating effect on me.  Violets, roses, mignonette, and many others, though very delicious, give me no sexual feeling at all.  For this reason the line, ’The lilies and languors of virtue for the roses and raptures of vice’ seems all wrong to me.  The lily seems to me a very sensual flower, while the rose and its scent seem very good and countrified and virtuous.  Shelley’s description of the lily of the valley, ‘whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale,’ falls in much more with my ideas.  “I can quite understand,” she adds, “that leather, especially of books, might have an exciting effect, as the smell has this penetrating quality, but I do not think it produces any special feeling in me.”  This more sensuous character of white flowers is fairly obvious to many persons who do not experience from them any specifically sexual effects.  To some people lilies have an odor which they describe as sexual, although these persons may be quite unaware that Hindu authors long since described the vulvar secretion of the Padmini, or perfect woman, during coitus, as “perfumed like the lily that has newly burst."[75] It is noteworthy that it was more especially the white flowers—­lily, tuberose, etc.—­which were long ago noted by Cloquet as liable to cause various unpleasant nervous effects, cardiac oppression and syncope.[76]