to sharpen his wit. And all these cramped and stultified lives have not
availed to make the world understand that women have had to pay for their
celibacy!

"The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes.
The butterfly beside the road
Preaches contentment to that toad."

Modern psychology is lifting the veil to-day from the suffering which
repression causes. It is a pity that its most brilliant exponents should
ascribe to a single instinct--however potent--_all_ the ills that afflict
mankind, for such one-sidedness defeats its own object; but, at least, the
modern psychologist is trying to show us "exactly where each tooth-point
goes" in the repression of the sex-instinct among women as among men. Nor
does the fact that the _tabu_ of society has actually in many cases enabled
a woman to inhibit the development of her own nature, obviate the fact that
she does so at great cost, even when she least understands what she does.

I affirm this, and with insistence, that the normal--the average--woman
sacrifices a great deal if she accepts life-long celibacy. She sacrifices
quite as much as a man. In those cases--too frequent even now--where she
is not educated or expected to earn her own living or to have a career, I
maintain that she loses more than a man who is expected to work. I do not
say, and I do not believe, that passion in a woman is the same as in a man,
or that they suffer in precisely the same way. I believe indeed that if men
and women understood each other a little better they would hurt each other
a good deal less. But I am persuaded that we shall not even begin to reach
a wise morality so long as we persist in basing our demands on the imbecile
assumption that women suffer nothing or little by the unsatisfaction of the