h of wholesome reality has been
carefully omitted. "All the candor of faith is there," as Senancour puts
it in his book _De l'Amour_, "the desires of inexperience, the needs of a
new life, the hopes of an upright heart. She has all the faculties of
love, she must love; she has all the means of pleasure, she must be loved.
Everything expresses love and demands love: this hand formed for sweet
caresses, an eye whose resources are unknown if it must not say that it
consents to be loved, a bosom which is motionless and useless without
love, and will fade without having been worshipped; these feelings that
are so vast, so tender, so voluptuous, the ambition of the heart, the
heroism of passion! She needs must follow the delicious rule which the law
of the world has dictated. That intoxicating part, which she knows so
well, which everything recalls, which the day inspires and the night
commands, what young, sensitive, loving woman can imagine that she shall
not play it?" But when the actual drama of love begins to unroll before
her, and she realizes the true nature of the "intoxicating part" she has
to play, then, it has often happened, the case is altered; she finds
herself altogether unprepared, and is overcome with terror and alarm. All
the felicity of her married life may then hang on a few chances, her
husband's skill and consideration, her own presence of mind. Hirschfeld
records the case of an innocent young girl of seventeen--in this case, it
eventually proved, an invert--who was persuaded to marry but on
discovering what marriage meant energetically resisted her husband's
sexual approaches. He appealed to her mother to explain to her daughter
the nature of "wifely duties." But the young wife replied to her mother's
expostulations, "If that is my wifely duty then it was your parental duty
to have told me beforehand, for, if I had known, I should never have
married." The husband in this case, much in love with his wife, sought for
eight years to over-persuade her, but in vain, and a separation finally
took place.[36] That, no doubt, is an extreme case, but how many innocent
young inverted girls never realize their true nature until after marriage,
and how many perfectly normal girls are so shocked by the too sudden
initiation of marriage that their beautiful early dreams of love never
develop slowly and wholesomely into the acceptance of its still more
beautiful realities?

Before the age of puberty it would seem that t