of the child, as well as the very significant fact that among man's
immediate or even remote ancestors the female's voice can seldom have
served to attract the male, sufficiently account for the small part played
by the voice and by music as a sexual allurement working on men.[122]

It is otherwise with women. It may, indeed, be said at the outset that the
reasons which make it antecedently improbable that men should be sexually
attracted through hearing render it probable that women should be so
attracted. The change in the voice at puberty makes the deeper masculine
voice a characteristic secondary sexual attribute of man, while the fact
that among mammals generally it is the male that is most vocal--and that
chiefly, or even sometimes exclusively, at the rutting season--renders it
antecedently likely that among mammals generally, including the human
species, there is in the female an actual or latent susceptibility to the
sexual significance of the male voice,[123] a susceptibility which, under
the conditions of human civilization, may be transferred to music
generally. It is noteworthy that in novels written by women there is a
very frequent attentiveness to the qualities of the hero's voice and to
its emotional effects on the heroine.[124] We may also note the special
and peculiar personal enthusiasm aroused in women by popular musicians, a
more pronounced enthusiasm than is evoked in them by popular actors.

As an interesting example of the importance attached by women
novelists to the effects of the male voice I may refer to George
Eliot's _Mill on the Floss_, probably the most intimate and
personal of George Eliot's works. In Book VI of this novel the
influence of Stephen Guest (a somewhat commonplace young man)
over Maggie Tulliver is ascribed almost exclusively to the effect
of his base voice in singing. We are definitely told of Maggie
Tulliver's "sensibility to the supreme excitement of music."
Thus, on one occasion, "all her intentions were lost in the vague
state of emotion produced by the inspiring duet--emotion that
seemed to make her at once strong and weak: strong for all
enjoyment, weak for all resistance. Poor Maggie! She looked very
beautiful when her soul was being played on in this way by the
inexorable power of sound. You might have seen the slightest
perceptible quivering through her whole frame as she leaned a
little forward, cla