it. So that, while the husband is content with a mere simulacrum and
pretence of the erotic life, the wife has often had none at all.

Few people realise--few indeed have the knowledge or the opportunity to
realise--how much women thus lose, alike in the means to fulfill their
own lives and in the power to help others. A woman has a husband, she has
marital relationships, she has children, she has all the usual domestic
troubles--it seems to the casual observer that she has everything that
constitutes a fully developed matron fit to play her proper part in the
home and in the world. Yet with all these experiences, which undoubtedly
are an important part of life, she may yet remain on the emotional
side--and, as a matter of fact, frequently remains--quite virginal, as
immature as a school-girl. She has not acquired an erotic personality, she
has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature
remains ill-developed and unharmonised, and that she is incapable of
bringing her personality--having indeed no achieved personality to
bring--to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around
her.

That alone is a great misfortune, all the more tragic since under
favourable conditions, which it should have been natural to attain, it
might so easily be avoided. But there is this further result, full of the
possibilities of domestic tragedy, that the wife so situated, however
innocent, however virtuous, may at any time find her virginally sensitive
emotional nature fertilised by the touch of some other man than her
husband.

It happens so often. A girl who has been carefully guarded in the home,
preserved from evil companions, preserved also from what her friends
regarded as the contamination of sexual knowledge, a girl of high ideals,