tice. A
friend of my husband finds his chief pleasure in imagining women
hurt and ill-treated, but is too tender-hearted ever to inflict
pain on them in reality, even when they are willing to submit to
it. Perhaps a woman's readiness to submit to pain to please a man
may sometimes be taken for pleasure in it. Even when women like
the idea of pain, I fancy it is only because it implies
subjection to the man, from association with the fact that
physical pleasure must necessarily be preceded by submission to
his will."

In a subsequent communication this lady enlarged and perhaps
somewhat modified her statements on this point:--

"I don't think that what I said to you was quite correct.
_Actual_ pain gives me no pleasure, yet the _idea_ of pain does,
_if inflicted by way of discipline and for the ultimate good of
the person suffering it_. This is essential. For instance, I once
read a poem in which the devil and the lost souls in hell were
represented as recognizing that they could not be good except
under torture, but that while suffering the purifying actions of
the flames of hell they so realized the beauty of holiness that
they submitted willingly to their agony and praised God for the
sternness of his judgment. This poem gave me decided physical
pleasure, yet I know that if my hand were held in a fire for five
minutes I should feel nothing but the pain of the burning. To get
the feeling of pleasure, too, I must, for the moment, revert to
my old religious beliefs and my old notion that mere suffering
has an elevating influence; one's emotions are greatly modified
by one's beliefs. When I was about fifteen I invented a game
which I played with a younger sister, in which we were supposed
to be going through a process of discipline and preparation for
heaven after death. Each person was supposed to enter this state
on dying and to pass successively into the charge of different
angels named after the special virtues it was their function to
instill. The last angel was that of Love, who governed solely by
the quality whose name he bore. In the lower stages, we were
under an angel called Severity who prepared us by extreme
harshness and by exacting implicit obedience to arbitrary orders
for the acquirement of later virtues. Our duties were to
superintend the weather, paint