and love must come through these channels or not at all.  The difference, however, seems to be a real one, if we translate it to mean that, as we have seen reason to believe in previous volumes of these Studies, there are in women (1) preferential sensory paths of sexual stimuli, such as, apparently, a predominence of tactile and auditory paths as compared with men; (2) a more massive, complex, and delicately poised sexual mechanism; and, as a result of this, (3) eventually a greater amount of nervous and cerebral sexual irradiation.

It must be remembered, at the same time, that while this distinction represents a real tendency in sexual differentiation, with an organic and not merely traditional basis, it has about it nothing whatever that is absolute.  There are a vast number of women whose sexual facility, again by natural tendency and not merely by acquired habits, is as marked as that of any man, if not more so.  In the sexual field, as we have seen in a previous volume (Analysis of the Sexual Impulse), the range of variability is greater in women than in men.

The fact that love is an art, a method of drawing music from an instrument, and not the mere commission of an act by mutual consent, makes any verbal agreement to love of little moment.  If love were a matter of contract, of simple intellectual consent, of question and answer, it would never have come into the world at all.  Love appeared as art from the first, and the subsequent developments of the summary methods of reason and speech cannot abolish that fundamental fact.  This is scarcely realized by those ill-advised lovers who consider that the first step in courtship—­and perhaps even the whole of courtship—­is for a man to ask a woman to be his wife.  That is so far from being the case that it constantly happens that the premature exhibition of so large a demand at once and for ever damns all the wooer’s chances.  It is lamentable, no doubt, that so grave and fateful a matter as that of marriage should so often be decided without calm deliberation and reasonable forethought.  But sexual relationships can never, and should never, be merely a matter of cold calculation.  When a woman is suddenly confronted by the demand that she should yield herself up as a wife to a man who has not yet succeeded in gaining her affections she will not fail to find—­provided she is lifted above the cold-hearted motives of self-interest—­that there are many sound reasons why she should not do so.  And having thus squarely faced the question in cool blood and decided it, she will henceforth, probably, meet that wooer with a tunic of steel enclosing her breast.