elp to
explain why it is that in so many parts of the world defloration is not
immediately effected on marriage.[404] No doubt religious or magic reasons
may also intervene here, but, as so often happens, they harmonize with the
biological process. This is the case even among uncivilized peoples who
marry early. The need for delay and considerate skill is far greater when,
as among ourselves, a woman's marriage is delayed long past the
establishment of puberty to a period when it is more difficult to break
down the psychic and perhaps even physical barriers of personality.

It has to be added that the art of love in the act of courtship is not
confined to the preliminaries to the single act of coitus. In a sense the
life of love is a continuous courtship with a constant progression. The
establishment of physical intercourse is but the beginning of it. This is
especially true of women. "The consummation of love," says Senancour,[405]
"which is often the end of love with man is only the beginning of love
with woman, a test of trust, a gage of future pleasure, a sort of
engagement for an intimacy to come." "A woman's soul and body," says
another writer,[406] "are not given at one stroke at a given moment; but
only slowly, little by little, through many stages, are both delivered to
the beloved. Instead of abandoning the young woman to the bridegroom on
the wedding night, as an entrapped mouse is flung to the cat to be
devoured, it would be better to let the young bridal couple live side by
side, like two friends and comrades, until they gradually learn how to
develop and use their sexual consciousness." The conventional wedding is
out of place as a preliminary to the consummation of marriage, if only on
the ground that it is impossible to say at what stage in the endless
process of courtship it ought to take place.

A woman, unlike a man, is prepared by Nature, to play a skilful part in
the art of love. The man's part in courtship, which is that of the male
throughout the zooelogical series, may be difficult and hazardous, but it
is in a straight line, fairly simple and direct. The woman's part, having
to follow at the same moment two quite different impulses, is necessarily
always in a zigzag or a curve. That is to say that at every erotic moment
her action is the resultant of the combined force of her desire (conscious
or unconscious) and her modesty. She must sail through a tortuous channel
with Scylla on the one side a