ed and the friendship
brought to an end. Love-making is not indeed necessary. The wife's latent
erotic needs, while still remaining unconscious, have come nearer to the
surface; now that she has grown mature and that they have been stimulated
yet unsatisfied for so long, they have, unknown to herself, become
insistent and sensitive to a sympathetic touch. The friends may indeed
grow into lovers, and then some sort of solution, by divorce or
intrigue--scarcely however a desirable kind of solution--becomes possible.
But we are here taking the highest ground and assuming that honourable
feeling, domestic affection, or a stern sense of moral duty, renders such
solution unacceptable. In due course the husband returns, and then, to her
utter dismay, the wife discovers, if she has not discovered it before,
that during his absence, and for the first time in her life, she has
fallen in love. She loyally confesses the situation to her husband, for
whom her affection and attachment remain the same as before, for what has
happened to her is the coming of a totally new kind of love and not any
change in her old love. The situation which arises is one of torturing
anxiety for all concerned, and it is not less so when all concerned are
animated by noble and self-sacrificing impulses. The husband in his
devotion to his wife may even be willing that her new impulses should be
gratified. She, on her side, will not think of yielding to desires which
seem both unfair to her husband and opposed to all her moral traditions.
We are not here concerned to consider the most likely, or the most
desirable, exit from this unfortunate situation. The points to note are
that it is a situation which to-day actually occurs; that it causes acute
unhappiness to at least two people who may be of the finest physical and
intellectual type and the noblest character, and that it might be avoided
if there were at the outset a proper understanding of the married state
and of the part which the art of love plays in married happiness and the
development of personality.

A woman may have been married once, she may have been married twice, she
may have had children by both husbands, and yet it may not be until she is
past the age of thirty and is united to a third man that she attains the
development of erotic personality and all that it involves in the full
flowering of her whole nature. Up to then she had to all appearance had
all the essential experiences of life.