yet healthy and robust, is married to a man of whom she probably has
little more than a conventional knowledge. Yet he may by good chance be
the masculine counterpart of herself, well brought up, without sexual
experience and ignorant of all but the elementary facts of sex, loyal and
honourable, prepared to be, fitted to be, a devoted husband. The union
seems to be of the happiest kind; no one detects that anything is lacking
to this perfect marriage; in course of time one or more children are born.
But during all this time the husband has never really made love to his
wife; he has not even understood what courtship in the intimate sense
means; love as an art has no existence for him; he has loved his wife
according to his imperfect knowledge, but he has never so much as realised
that his knowledge was imperfect. She on her side loves her husband; she
comes in time indeed to have a sort of tender maternal feeling for him.
Possibly she feels a little pleasure in intercourse with him. But she has
never once been profoundly aroused, and she has never once been utterly
satisfied. The deep fountains of her nature have never been unsealed; she
has never been fertilised throughout her whole nature by their liberating
influence; her erotic personality has never been developed. Then
something happens. Perhaps the husband is called away, it may have been to
take part in the Great War. The wife, whatever her tender solicitude for
her absent partner, feels her solitude and is drawn nearer to friends,
perhaps her husband's friends. Some man among them becomes congenial to
her. There need be no conscious or overt love-making on either side, and
if there were the wife's loyalty might be aroused and the friendship
brought to an end. Love-making is not indeed necessary. The wife's latent
erotic needs, while still remaining unconscious, have come nearer to the
surface; now that she has grown mature and that they have been stimulated
yet unsatisfied for so long, they have, unknown to herself, become
insistent and sensitive to a sympathetic touch. The friends may indeed
grow into lovers, and then some sort of solution, by divorce or