him, how her true
female self is his, is wife-submissive to him as never, never it could
be to a husband. This is the quiescent, flowering love of a mature
woman. It is the very flower of a woman's love: sexually asking
nothing, asking nothing of the beloved, save that he shall be himself,
and that for his living he shall accept the gift of her love. This is
the perfect flower of married love, which a husband should put in his
cap as he goes forward into the future in his supreme activity. For
the husband, it is a great pledge, and a blossom. For the son also it
seems wonderful. The woman now feels for the first time as a true wife
might feel. And her feeling is towards her son.

Or, instead of mother and son, read father and daughter.

And then what? The son gets on swimmingly for a time, till he is faced
with the actual fact of sex necessity. He gleefully inherits his
adolescence and the world at large, without an obstacle in his way,
mother-supported, mother-loved. Everything comes to him in glamour,
he feels he sees wondrous much, understands a whole heaven,
mother-stimulated. Think of the power which a mature woman thus
infuses into her boy. He flares up like a flame in oxygen. No wonder
they say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad
fates.

And then?--and then, with this glamorous youth? What is he actually to
do with his sensual, sexual self? Bury it? Or make an effort with a
stranger? For he is taught, even by his mother, that his manhood must
not forego sex. Yet he is linked up in ideal love already, the best he
will ever know.

No woman will give to a stranger that which she gives to her son, her
father or her brother: that beautiful and glamorous submission which
is truly the wife-submission. To a stranger, a husband, a woman
insists on being queen, goddess, mistress, the positive, the adored,
the first and foremost and the one and only. This she will not ask
from her near blood-kin. Of her blood-kin, there is always one she
will love devotedly.

And so, the charming young girl who adores her father, or one of her
brothers, is sought in marriage by the attractive young man who loves
his mother devotedly. And a pretty business the marriage is. We can't
think of it. Of course they may be good pals. It's the only thing
left.

And there we are. The game is spoilt before it is begun. Within the
circle of the family, owing to our creed of insatiable love, intense
adult sympathies are pr