cious, all of the
highest interest, and that, whatever they may have been, they are
renewed with incredible vivacity on the sight of this sign, even
when perceived on the face of another woman. If in such a case we
come to prefer and love _ugliness_, it is only because in such a
case ugliness is beauty. A man loved a woman who was very thin
and marked by smallpox; he lost her by death. Three years later,
in Rome, he became acquainted with two women, one very beautiful,
the other thin and marked by smallpox, on that account, if you
will, rather ugly. I saw him in love with this plain one at the
end of a week, which he had employed in effacing her plainness by
his memories." (_De l'Amour_, Chapter XVII.)

In the tendency to idealize the unbeautiful features of a beloved person
erotic symbolism shows itself in a simple and normal form. In a less
simple and more morbid form it appears in persons in whom the normal paths
of sexual gratification are for some reasons inhibited, and who are thus
led to find the symbols of natural love in unnatural perversions. It is
for this reason that so many erotic symbolisms take root in childhood and
puberty, before the sexual instincts have reached full development. It is
for the same reason also, that, at the other end of life, when the sexual
energies are failing, erotic symbols sometimes tend to be substituted for
the normal pleasures of sex. It is for this reason, again, that both men
and women whose normal energies are inhibited sometimes find the symbols
of sexual gratification in the caresses of children.

The case of a schoolmistress recorded by Penta instructively
shows how an erotic symbolism of this last kind may develop by no
means as a refinement of vice, but as the one form in which
sexual gratification becomes possible when normal gratification
has been pathologically inhibited. F.R., aged 48, schoolmistress;
she was some years ago in an asylum with religious mania, but
came out well in a few months. At the age of 12 she had first
experienced sexual excitement in a railway train from the jolting
of the carriage. Soon after she fell in love with a youth who
represented her ideal and who returned her affection. When,
however, she gave herself to him, great was her disillusion and
surprise to find that the sexual act which she had looked forward
to could not be accomplished, for at