[385] “The first night,” writes a correspondent concerning his marriage, “she found the act very painful and was frightened and surprised at the size of my penis, and at my suddenly getting on her.  We had talked very openly about sex things before marriage, and it never occurred to me that she was ignorant of the details of the act.  I imagined it would disgust her to talk about these things; but I now see I should have explained things to her.  Before marrying I had come to the conclusion that the respect owed to one’s wife was incompatible with any talk that might seem indecent, and also I had made a resolve not to subject her to what I thought then were dirty tricks, even to be naked and to have her naked.  In fact, I was the victim of mock modesty; it was an artificial reaction from the life I had been living before marriage.  Now it seems to me to be natural, if you love a woman, to do whatever occurs to you and to her.  If I had not felt it wrong to encourage such acts between us, there might have been established a sexual sympathy which would have bound me more closely to her.”

[386] Montaigne, Essais, Bk. iii, Ch.  V. It is a significant fact that, even in the matter of information, women, notwithstanding much ignorance and inexperience, are often better equipped for marriage than men.  As Fuerbringer remarks (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 212), although the wife is usually more chaste at marriage than the husband, yet “she is generally the better informed partner in matters pertaining to the married state, in spite of occasional astonishing confessions.”

[387] “She never loses her self-respect nor my respect for her,” a man writes in a letter, “simply because we are desperately in love with one another, and everything we do—­some of which the lowest prostitute might refuse to do—­seems but one attempt after another to translate our passion into action.  I never realized before, not that to the pure all things are pure, indeed, but that to the lover nothing is indecent.  Yes, I have always felt it, to love her is a liberal education.”  It is obviously only the existence of such an attitude as this that can enable a pure woman to be passionate.

[388] “To be really understood,” as Rafford Pyke well says, “to say what she likes, to utter her innermost thoughts in her own way, to cast aside the traditional conventions that gall her and repress her, to have someone near her with whom she can be quite frank, and yet to know that not a syllable of what she says will be misinterpreted or mistaken, but rather felt just as she feels it all—­how wonderfully sweet is this to every woman, and how few men are there who can give it to her!”

[389] In more recent times it has been discussed in relation to the frequency of spontaneous nocturnal emissions.  See “The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity,” Sect.  II, in volume i of these Studies, and cf.  Mr. Perry-Coste’s remarks on “The Annual Rhythm,” in Appendix B of the same volume.