a
moth, I wanted to play with fire.

On the next page I find this:

"Seraphine disapproves of my attitude towards men. She gave me a great
talking to last night and said things I would not take from anyone else.
Dear old Seraphine, she is so fine and kind! She says there is nothing
in my physical makeup that compels me to be a flirt. I can act more
discreetly if I wish to. It is my mental attitude toward romantic things
that is wrong. Thousands of women just as pretty as I am never place
themselves in situations with men that are almost certain to lead them
into temptation. They will not start an emotional episode that may
easily, as they know quite well, have a dangerous ending. But I am
always ready to start, confident that my self-control will save me from
any immediate disaster. And so far it always has."

How earnestly Seraphine sounded her warning. I wrote down her words and
promised to heed them: "_Remember, dear, that emotional desire
deliberately aroused in 'harmless flirtations' and then deliberately
repressed is an offense against womanhood, a menace to the health, and a
degradation to the soul._"

* * * * *

_Thursday night._

I am horribly sad tonight--lonely--discouraged. The doctor wants to know
about my married life, about my husband. Why was I unhappy? Why is any
woman unhappy? Because her love is trampled on, degraded--the spiritual
part of it unsatisfied. Women are made for love and without love life
means nothing to them. Women are naturally finer than men, they aspire
more strongly to what is beautiful and spiritual, but their souls can be
coarsened, their love can be killed. They can be driven--they have been
driven for centuries (through fear of men) into lies and deceits and
sensuality or pretence of sensuality.

The great tragedy of the world is sensuality, and it may exist between
man and wife just as much as between a man and a paid woman. I don't
know whether the Bible condemns sensuality between man and wife, but it
ought to. I remember a story by Tolstoy in which the great moralist
strips off our mask of hypocrisy and shows the hideous evil that results
when a man and a woman degrade the holy sacrament of marriage. That is
not love, but a perversion of love. How can God bless a union in which
the wife is expected to conduct herself like a wanton or lose her
husband? And she loses him anyway, for sensuality in a man inevitably
leads him to promiscuousn