as an entrapped mouse is flung to the cat to be devoured, it would be better to let the young bridal couple live side by side, like two friends and comrades, until they gradually learn how to develop and use their sexual consciousness.”  The conventional wedding is out of place as a preliminary to the consummation of marriage, if only on the ground that it is impossible to say at what stage in the endless process of courtship it ought to take place.

A woman, unlike a man, is prepared by Nature, to play a skilful part in the art of love.  The man’s part in courtship, which is that of the male throughout the zooelogical series, may be difficult and hazardous, but it is in a straight line, fairly simple and direct.  The woman’s part, having to follow at the same moment two quite different impulses, is necessarily always in a zigzag or a curve.  That is to say that at every erotic moment her action is the resultant of the combined force of her desire (conscious or unconscious) and her modesty.  She must sail through a tortuous channel with Scylla on the one side and Charybdis on the other, and to avoid either danger too anxiously may mean risking shipwreck on the other side.  She must be impenetrable to all the world, but it must be an impenetrability not too obscure for the divination of the right man.  Her speech must be honest, but yet on no account tell everything; her actions must be the outcome of her impulses, and on that very account be capable of two interpretations.  It is only in the last resort of complete intimacy that she can become the perfect woman,

“Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought,
Nor Love her body from her soul.”

For many a woman the conditions for that final erotic avatar—­“that splendid shamelessness which,” as Rafford Pyke says, “is the finest thing in perfect love”—­never present themselves at all.  She is compelled to be to the end of her erotic life, what she must always be at the beginning, a complex and duplex personality, naturally artful.  Therewith she is better prepared than man to play her part in the art of love.

The man’s part in the art of love is, however, by no means easy.  That is not always realized by the women who complain of his lack of skill in playing it.  Although a man has not to cultivate the same natural duplicity as a woman, it is necessary that he should possess a considerable power of divination.  He is not well prepared for that, because the traditional masculine virtue is force rather than insight.  The male’s work in the world, we are told, is domination, and it is by such domination that the female is attracted.  There is an element of truth in that doctrine, an element of truth which may well lead astray the man who too exclusively relies upon it in the art of love.  Violence is bad in every art, and in the erotic art the female desires to be won to love and not to be ordered to love.  That is fundamental.  We sometimes see the matter so