ghter's joy--must be respected. But this makes not the least
difference to the result, only to the way in which that result is
gained. So the whole of our society is filled with half-concealed
sex-snares and pitfalls set by women for the capture of men. The woman
waits _passive_! Yes, precisely, she often does. But exactly the same
may be said of the female spider when she has spun her web, from which
she knows full well the victim fly will not escape.

There is another point that must be noticed. Under our present sexual
relationships the price the woman asks from the man for her favours is
marriage as the only means of gaining permanent maintenance for
herself and for her children. Now that these economic considerations
have entered into love she has to act with a new and greater caution,
for she has to gain her own ends as well as Nature's ends. In the
matriarchal society the girl was allowed openly to pick her lover, and
forthwith he went with her. But to the modern woman, under the
patriarchal ideals, if she shows the modesty that convention requires
of her, all that is permitted is the invitation of a lowered eyelid, a
look, or perchance a touch, at one time given, at another withheld.

Now, I find it the opinion of most of my men friends that such
half-concealed encouragements, such evasions and drawings back are a
necessary part of the love-play--the woman's unconscious testing of
the fussy male. There is one friend, a doctor, who tells me that the
woman's dissimulation of her own inclination has come to be a
secondary sexual characteristic, a manifestation of the operation of
sexual selection, diluted, perhaps, and altered by civilisation, but
an essential feature in every courtship, so that the woman follows a
true and biologically valuable instinct when she temporises and
dissembles, and tests and provokes, and entices and repels. She is
proving herself and testing her lovers before she permits that awful
"merging" that no after-thought can undo.

Now, on the face of it this seems true. There is a passionate
uncertainty that all true lovers feel. It is, I think, a holding back
from the yielding up of the individual ego--an unconscious revolt from
the sacrifice claimed by the creative force before which both the
woman and the man alike are helpless agents. It is very difficult to
find the truth. Throughout Nature love only fulfils its purpose after
much expenditure of energy. But dissimulation on the side of