Yet she had remained spiritually
virginal, with conventionally prim ideas of life, narrow in her
sympathies, with the finest and noblest functions of her soul helpless and
bound, at heart unhappy even if not clearly realising that she was
unhappy. Now she has become another person. The new liberated forces from
within have not only enabled her to become sensitive to the rich
complexities of intimate personal relationship, they have enlarged and
harmonised her realisation of all relationships. Her new erotic experience
has not only stimulated all her energies, but her new knowledge has
quickened all her sympathies. She feels, at the same time, more mentally
alert, and she finds that she is more alive than before to the influences
of nature and of art. Moreover, as others observe, however they may
explain it, a new beauty has come into her face, a new radiancy into her
expression, a new force into all her activities. Such is the exquisite
flowering of love which some of us who may penetrate beneath the surface
of life are now and then privileged to see. The sad part of it is that we
see it so seldom and then often so late.

It must not be supposed that there is any direct or speedy way of
introducing into life a wider and deeper conception of the erotic
play-function, and all that it means for the development of the
individual, the enrichment of the marriage relationship, and the moral
harmony of society. Such a supposition would merely be to vulgarise and to
stultify the divine and elusive mystery. It is only slowly and indirectly
that we can bring about the revolution which in this direction would renew
life. We may prepare the way for it by undermining and destroying those
degrading traditional conceptions which have persisted so long that they
are instilled into us almost from birth, to work like a virus in the
heart, and to become almost a disease of the soul. To make way for the
true and beautiful revelation, we can at least seek to cast out those
ancient growths, which may once have been true and beautiful, but now are
false and poisonous. By casting out from us the conception of love as vile
and unclean we shall purify the chambers of our hearts for the reception
of love as something unspeakably holy.

In this matter we may learn a lesson from the psycho-analysts of to-day
without any implication that psycho-analysis is necessarily a desirable or
even possible way of attaining the revelation of love. The wiser
p