affection which is in his nature to give to pets and all helpless
(and preferably dumb) creatures."

"When the devotion in the tie between mother and son," a woman
writes, "is added to the relation of husband and wife, the union
of marriage is raised to the high and beautiful dignity it
deserves, and can attain in this world. It comprehends sympathy,
love, and perfect understanding, even of the faults and
weaknesses of both sides." "The foundation of every true woman's
love," another woman writes, "is a mother's tenderness. He whom
she loves is a child of larger growth, although she may at the
same time have a deep respect for him." (See also, for similar
opinion of another woman of distinguished intellectual ability,
footnote at beginning of "The Psychic State in Pregnancy" in
volume v of these _Studies_.)

It is on the basis of these elemental human facts that the
permanently seductive and inspiring relationships of sex are
developed, and not by the emergence of personalities who combine
impossibly exalted characteristics. "The task is extremely
difficult," says Kisch in his _Sexual Life of Woman_, "but a
clever and virtuous modern wife must endeavor to combine in her
single personality the sensuous attractiveness of an Aspasia, the
chastity of a Lucrece, and the intellectual greatness of a
Cornelia." And in an earlier century we are told in the novel of
_La Tia Fingida_, which has sometimes been attributed to
Cervantes, that "a woman should be an angel in the street, a
saint in church, beautiful at the window, honest in the house,
and a demon in bed." The demands made of men by women, on the
other hand, have been almost too lofty to bear definite
formulation at all. "Ninety-nine out of a hundred loving women,"
says Helene Stoecker, "certainly believe that if a thousand other
men have behaved ignobly, and forsaken, ill-used, and deceived
the woman they love, the man they love is an exception, marked
out from all other men; that is the reason they love him." It may
be doubted, however, if the great lovers have ever stood very far
above the ordinary level of humanity by their possession of
perfection. They have been human, and their art of love has not
always excluded the possession of human frailties; perfection,
indeed, even if it could be found, would furnish a bad so