lations, because it is the most
intimate and the most permanent. To live so close to another--who, in
spite of all, _remains_ another--to be brought so near, to associate so
intimately with another personality, without jarring or wounding--that
is hard. No wonder it is not invariably a success! But passion makes
it possible to many to whom, without this, it would not be possible.
Ultimately passion should be transcended since in any case it must be left
behind. Yet it has served its end, in deepening and intensifying the love
of two people for one another.

Where then lies the difficulty, since probably men and women alike would
agree that what I have said is true?

The difference of view is perhaps more in practice than in theory; yet it
is all the harder of adjustment for that. In theory, both men and women
would agree that physical union, ideally, should express a spiritual
union; and that in doing so, it deepens and intensifies it. But it is still
possible to disagree as to which of these two aspects of an admitted truth
is the more vital and fundamental.

It may be, as I have already suggested, that the woman's point of view is
due to her physiology; or it may at least be influenced by it. At least,
I am convinced that to the woman the sense that physical union is _only_
justified by already existent spiritual union, is the normal one. I believe
that, however incapable she may be of explaining it, and however her power
of reasoning may be vitiated by wrong ideas about the sexual relation, she
does instinctively recoil from its use when its reason for existence is not
there. She may attribute her reluctance to the fact that she is too womanly
(_sic_), too spiritually minded to have any desire for sexual relations at
all; her husband may attribute it to coldness of temperament or "modesty."
In fact, it is due to the cause I have stated, and if she had never been
called upon to give her body except when her own desire for the "outward
and visible sign" of an "inward and spiritual grace" demanded it, her
husband would have found that she was not temperamentally defective, but as
good a lover as he.

No one who lives in the world at all can fail to understand that in every
human relationship, and supremely in this one, there must be much mutual
accommodation, much give and take, a great gentleness to every claim made
in the name of love. All I am concerned to do here is to help to clear up
misunderstandings. It is no