nd Charybdis on the other, and to avoid
either danger too anxiously may mean risking shipwreck on the other side.
She must be impenetrable to all the world, but it must be an
impenetrability not too obscure for the divination of the right man. Her
speech must be honest, but yet on no account tell everything; her actions
must be the outcome of her impulses, and on that very account be capable
of two interpretations. It is only in the last resort of complete intimacy
that she can become the perfect woman,

"Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought,
Nor Love her body from her soul."

For many a woman the conditions for that final erotic avatar--"that
splendid shamelessness which," as Rafford Pyke says, "is the finest thing
in perfect love"--never present themselves at all. She is compelled to be
to the end of her erotic life, what she must always be at the beginning, a
complex and duplex personality, naturally artful. Therewith she is better
prepared than man to play her part in the art of love.

The man's part in the art of love is, however, by no means easy. That is
not always realized by the women who complain of his lack of skill in
playing it. Although a man has not to cultivate the same natural duplicity
as a woman, it is necessary that he should possess a considerable power of
divination. He is not well prepared for that, because the traditional
masculine virtue is force rather than insight. The male's work in the
world, we are told, is domination, and it is by such domination that the
female is attracted. There is an element of truth in that doctrine, an
element of truth which may well lead astray the man who too exclusively
relies upon it in the art of love. Violence is bad in every art, and in
the erotic art the female desires to be won to love and not to be ordered
to love. That is fundamental. We sometimes see the matter so stated as if
the objection to force and domination in love constituted some quite new
and revolutionary demand of the "modern woman." That is, it need scarcely
be said, the result of ignorance. The art of love, being an art that
Nature makes, is the same now as in essentials it has always been,[407]
and it was well established before woman came into existence. That it has
not always been very skilfully played is another matter. And, so far as
the man is concerned, it is this very tradition of masculine predominance
which has contributed to the difficulty of playing