s that nothing of that sort has ever happened to them. They
have always found men respectful and considerate."

I asked Julian about this one day when he was in a penitential mood and
he said:

"Of course you are right, the indiscretions of women are numerous,
inevitable; but it is the fault of men. The evidence is all about us.
Any woman may ascertain this from her husband, her father, her
grandfather, or her great-grandfather, if she can persuade one of these
gentlemen to be honest with her."

The ghastly truth is--this is the truth that has filled the world with
tears--that the average full-blooded male citizen is polygamous in his
instinct and to some extent in his practice.

Every reasonably attractive woman who has been called upon to face the
facts of life knows that men are impelled towards women by a force of
desire that they call over-powering. It is not over-powering, as
thousands of clean-minded men have proved, it is no more over-powering
than the desire to gamble or the desire to take drugs; it can be
conquered as these other desires have been conquered; but centuries of
wayward living under relaxed standards (the double standard) have made
men believe that it is over-powering and they act accordingly. And women
yield on one pretense or another, smilingly or tearfully--_how can they
resist the dominant will of half the human race?_

I find this in my diary heavily underscored:

"_How can the same act be a sin for half the race and not a sin for the
other half? For centuries men have proclaimed that women must not give
themselves to men, but men may give themselves to women. Is there any
greater absurdity? Wine may mix with water, but water must not mix with
wine._"

If these sex-complaisant women were really filled with remorse, burdened
with a sense of shame, we should all know it. Their eyes, their voices,
their daily lives would reveal it. Could a million women be in physical
pain, say from starvation, without all the world knowing it? Is pain of
the soul less torturing than pain of the body? The fact is that these
women are not in spiritual pain. They regard what they have done (often
regretfully) as a result of impossible conditions in the world today, a
world controlled by men.

I can speak about these things with a certain authority, since, for
years, I sympathized with the self-indulgent point of view, in fact I
lived in an artistic and Bohemian _milieu_ where many of my friends
followed