The psychology of the man of forty who falls in love with the girl of sixteen is more difficult to grasp. I think that in most cases the man's love interest is fixed away back in childhood; often the girl of sixteen is a substitute for a beloved sister. Perhaps on the other hand, a man of forty's paternal instinct has been starved so long that he wants to find at once a wife and a child. Few of us realise how much of our love interest is fixed in the past. Think of the men who want to be mothered by their wives . . . they generally address their wives as "Mother." I know happily married men who are psychically children; "mother" won't allow them to carry coals or wash dishes or brush clothes; she treats them as they unconsciously desire to be treated--as babes. It may be that Dauvit has a strong mother complex. He often talks of his mother, and more than once I have heard him say that she was the best woman he had ever known. It may be that he was unconsciously looking for the mother in Maggie and the other girls, and failed to find her. Maggie's remark about the sunset and the dress was not enough to stifle his love declaration. The soul he longed to find in Maggie may have been the soul of the mother he knew as an infant . . . the soul of his ideal woman. The more I see of men the less importance I pay to their conscious reasons for attitudes. "I hate Brown; he never washes"; "I dislike Mrs. Smith; she uses bad language." "Murphy is a rotter; he has no manners." Statements like these are rationalisations; the real reason for the dislike lies deeper in every case. VI The law courts have re-introduced flogging for criminals. To the best of my knowledge no member of the law profession has protested. If there is a reform movement within the law I never heard of it. The curse of law is that it works according to precedent, and it is therefore conservative. Our judges hand out sentences in blissful ignorance of later psychology. Last week a boy of eleven was birched for holding up another boy of nine on the highway and demanding tuppence or his life. The attitude of the bench is that fear of another flogging will prevent that boy from turning highwayman again. I admit that fear will cure him of that special vice, but what the bench does not know is that the boy's anti-social energy will take another form. Every act of man is prompted by a wish, and very often this wish is unconscious. And all the birching in the world will not destroy a wish; the most it can do is to change its form.