conditions which in the past have crushed and trammelled her, who is bound
to lead the way, and man to follow. So that it may be at last, that sexual
love--that tired angel who through the ages has presided over the march of
humanity, with distraught eyes, and feather-shafts broken, and wings
drabbled in the mires of lust and greed, and golden locks caked over with
the dust of injustice and oppression--till those looking at him have
sometimes cried in terror, "He is the Evil and not the Good of life!" and
have sought, if it were not possible, to exterminate him--shall yet, at
last, bathed from the mire and dust of ages in the streams of friendship
and freedom, leap upwards, with white wings spread, resplendent in the
sunshine of a distant future--the essentially Good and Beautiful of human
existence.

I have given this long and very wearisome explanation of the scope and
origin of this little book, because I feel that it might lead to grave
misunderstanding were it not understood how it came to be written.

I have inscribed it to my friend, Lady Constance Lytton; not because I
think it worthy of her, nor yet because of the splendid part she has played
in the struggle of the women fighting today in England for certain forms of
freedom for all women. It is, if I may be allowed without violating the
sanctity of a close personal friendship so to say, because she, with one or
two other men and women I have known, have embodied for me the highest
ideal of human nature, in which intellectual power and strength of will are
combined with an infinite tenderness and a wide human sympathy; a
combination which, whether in the person of the man or the woman, is
essential to the existence of the fully rounded and harmonised human
creature; and which an English woman of genius summed in one line when she
cried in her invocation of her great French sister:--