to you and to her. If
I had not felt it wrong to encourage such acts between us, there might
have been established a sexual sympathy which would have bound me more
closely to her."

[386] Montaigne, _Essais_, Bk. iii, Ch. V. It is a significant fact that,
even in the matter of information, women, notwithstanding much ignorance
and inexperience, are often better equipped for marriage than men. As
Fuerbringer remarks (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation
to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 212), although the wife is usually more chaste at
marriage than the husband, yet "she is generally the better informed
partner in matters pertaining to the married state, in spite of occasional
astonishing confessions."

[387] "She never loses her self-respect nor my respect for her," a man
writes in a letter, "simply because we are desperately in love with one
another, and everything we do--some of which the lowest prostitute might
refuse to do--seems but one attempt after another to translate our passion
into action. I never realized before, not that to the pure all things are
pure, indeed, but that to the lover nothing is indecent. Yes, I have
always felt it, to love her is a liberal education." It is obviously only
the existence of such an attitude as this that can enable a pure woman to
be passionate.

[388] "To be really understood," as Rafford Pyke well says, "to say what
she likes, to utter her innermost thoughts in her own way, to cast aside
the traditional conventions that gall her and repress her, to have someone
near her with whom she can be quite frank, and yet to know that not a
syllable of what she says will be misinterpreted or mistaken, but rather
felt just as she feels it all--how wonderfully sweet is this to every
woman, and how few men are there who can give it to her!"

[389] In more recent times it has been discussed in relation to the
frequency of spontaneous nocturnal emissions. See "The Phenomena of Sexual
Periodicity," Sect. II, in volume i of these _Studies_, and cf. Mr.
Perry-Coste's remarks on "The Annual Rhythm," in Appendix B of the same
volume.

[390] See "The Sexual Impulse in Women," vol. iii of these _Studies_.

[391] Zenobia's practice is referred to by Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, ed.
Bury, vol. i, p. 302. The Queen of Aragon's decision is recorded by the
Montpellier jurist, Nicolas Bohier (Boerius) in his _Decisiones_, etc.,
ed. of 1579, p. 563; it is referred to by Montaigne, _Essais_, B