such solution unacceptable.  In due course the husband returns, and then, to her utter dismay, the wife discovers, if she has not discovered it before, that during his absence, and for the first time in her life, she has fallen in love.  She loyally confesses the situation to her husband, for whom her affection and attachment remain the same as before, for what has happened to her is the coming of a totally new kind of love and not any change in her old love.  The situation which arises is one of torturing anxiety for all concerned, and it is not less so when all concerned are animated by noble and self-sacrificing impulses.  The husband in his devotion to his wife may even be willing that her new impulses should be gratified.  She, on her side, will not think of yielding to desires which seem both unfair to her husband and opposed to all her moral traditions.  We are not here concerned to consider the most likely, or the most desirable, exit from this unfortunate situation.  The points to note are that it is a situation which to-day actually occurs; that it causes acute unhappiness to at least two people who may be of the finest physical and intellectual type and the noblest character, and that it might be avoided if there were at the outset a proper understanding of the married state and of the part which the art of love plays in married happiness and the development of personality.

A woman may have been married once, she may have been married twice, she may have had children by both husbands, and yet it may not be until she is past the age of thirty and is united to a third man that she attains the development of erotic personality and all that it involves in the full flowering of her whole nature.  Up to then she had to all appearance had all the essential experiences of life.  Yet she had remained spiritually virginal, with conventionally prim ideas of life, narrow in her sympathies, with the finest and noblest functions of her soul helpless and bound, at heart unhappy even if not clearly realising that she was unhappy.  Now she has become another person.  The new liberated forces from within have not only enabled her to become sensitive to the rich complexities of intimate personal relationship, they have enlarged and harmonised her realisation of all relationships.  Her new erotic experience has not only stimulated all her energies, but her new knowledge has quickened all her sympathies.  She feels, at the same time, more mentally alert, and she finds that she is more alive than before to the influences of nature and of art.  Moreover, as others observe, however they may explain it, a new beauty has come into her face, a new radiancy into her expression, a new force into all her activities.  Such is the exquisite flowering of love which some of us who may penetrate beneath the surface of life are now and then privileged to see.  The sad part of it is that we see it so seldom and then often so late.