to someone whom in reality he despises and means to leave in an hour,
he does violence to his whole nature. The soul of him insists all the
time that this is a low business. His outraged mind and heart protest
and produce an evil after-taste. No man likes to remember such events.
The best of him could not enter into them. He is left jangled and
upset. All that makes such doings seem right at any time is that
when it has reached a certain degree of intensity passion seems to
justify its own demands. That is the age-long illusion whereby evil
deceives and betrays us. But till we have learnt to repudiate
that suggestion we are not even on the way to succeed in this part of
life. Often the men who defend such indulgences admit that they are
gross, and then fall back upon the contention that a man _must_ be
gross at times--that his nature demands it. It is a fairly serious
slander to offer to our sex. Fortunately there exist thousands of
incarnate proofs that it is _only_ a slander. We all know that his
sexual nature sets the ordinary healthy man a very serious problem, and
about that I have tried to speak with sympathy and charity in a later
chapter. But the assertion that a man _must_ be gross is hard
to hear with patience. It is one of the lies that savor of cowardice.

By "wildness," however, men sometimes mean temporary intimate relations
between men and women to which they _are_ led by love, and such
relationships are at least very different in moral quality from the
gross ones I have spoken of.

Why must they be condemned? My whole contention is that love and love
alone makes physical intimacy pure and right. Why then cannot love
sanctify passionate relationships outside marriage? Why should the
union of true lovers be held to be impure before marriage and pure
after it?