has conquered other women. Even the most religious and moral
young woman, Valera remarks (_Dona Luz_, p. 205), likes to marry
a man who has loved many women; it gives a greater value to his
choice of her; it also offers her an opportunity of converting
him to higher ideals. No doubt when the inexperienced man meets
in marriage the equally inexperienced woman they often succeed in
adapting themselves to each other and a permanent _modus vivendi_
is constituted. But it is by no means so always. If the wife is
taught by instinct or experience she is apt to resent the
awkwardness and helplessness of her husband in the art of love.
Even if she is ignorant she may be permanently alienated and
become chronically frigid, through the brutal inconsiderateness
of her ignorant husband in carrying out what he conceives to be
his marital duties. (It has already been necessary to touch on
this point in discussing "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in vol.
iii of these _Studies_.) Sometimes, indeed, serious physical
injury has been inflicted on the bride owing to this ignorance of
the husband.

"I take it that most men have had pre-matrimonial
sex-relationships," a correspondent writes. "But I have known one
man at least who, up till the age of twenty, had not even a
rudimentary idea of sex matters. At twenty-nine, a few months
before marriage, he came to ask me how coitus was performed, and
displayed an ignorance that I could not believe to exist in the
mind of an otherwise intelligent man. He had evidently no
instinct to guide him, as the brutes have, and his reason was
unable to supply the necessary knowledge. It is very curious that
man should lose this instinctive knowledge. I have known another
man almost equally ignorant. He also came to me for advice in
marital duties. Both of these men masturbated, and they were
normally passionate." Such cases are not so very rare. Usually,
however, a certain amount of information has been acquired from
some for the most part unsatisfactory source, and the ignorance
is only partial, though not on that account less dangerous.

Balzac has compared the average husband to an orang-utan trying
to play the violin. "Love, as we instinctively feel, is the most
melodious of harmonies. Woman is a delicious instrument of
pleasure, but it is necessary to k