This greater difficulty and delay on the part of women in responding to the erotic excitation of courtship is really very fundamental and—­as has so often been necessary to point out in previous volumes of these Studies—­it covers the whole of woman’s erotic life, from the earliest age when coyness and modesty develop.  A woman’s love develops much more slowly than a man’s for a much longer period.  There is real psychological significance in the fact that a man’s desire for a woman tends to arise spontaneously, while a woman’s desire for a man tends only to be aroused gradually, in the measure of her complexly developing relationship to him.  Hence her sexual emotion is often less abstract, more intimately associated with the individual lover in whom it is centred.  “The way to my senses is through my heart,” wrote Mary Wollstonecraft to her lover Imlay, “but, forgive me!  I think there is sometimes a shorter cut to yours.”  She spoke for the best, if not for the largest part, of her sex.  A man often reaches the full limit of his physical capacity for love at a single step, and it would appear that his psychic limits are often not more difficult to reach.  This is the solid fact underlying the more hazardous statement, so often made, that woman is monogamic and man polygamic.

On the more physical side, Guttceit states that a month after marriage not more than two women out of ten have experienced the full pleasure of sexual intercourse, and it may not be for six months, a year, or even till after the birth of several children, that a woman experiences the full enjoyment of the physical relationship, and even then only with a man she completely loves, so that the conditions of sexual gratification are much more complex in women than in men.  Similarly, on the psychic side, Ellen Key remarks (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 111):  “It is certainly true that a woman desires sexual gratification from a man.  But while in her this desire not seldom only appears after she has begun to love a man enough to give her life for him, a man often desires to possess a woman physically before he loves her enough to give even his little finger for her.  The fact that love in a woman mostly goes from the soul to the senses and often fails to reach them, and that in a man it mostly goes from the senses to the soul and frequently never reaches that goal—­this is of all the existing differences between men and women that which causes most torture to both.”  It will, of course, be apparent to the reader of the fourth volume of these Studies on “Sexual Selection in Man” that the method of stating the difference which has commended itself to Mary Wollstonecraft, Ellen Key, and others, is not strictly correct, and the chastest woman, after, for example, taking too hot a bath, may find that her heart is not the only path through which her senses may be affected.  The senses are the only channels to the external world which we possess,