The love episode is not a violent activity for a brief space of five or ten minutes. In its highest form it begins when either of the pair thinks of any part of it. A true work of erotic art will progress from these thoughts, through all the phases of verbal mention, or actual carrying out of any preliminary—all the various verbal and other endearments, all the caresses and changing contacts, in multitudinous variety of external circumstances. It will progress through the purely physical part of it, or that part which is regarded as purely physical (but which never is, exclusively), and will continue for an hour to a day after the erotic acme. During this post-acme time all the thoughts and emotions of each will be referred to the past episode and not to any future one. In the interim between the evanescence of these thought-reverberations, and the growing tension of another approaching love episode there may be a space of some hours or a day or two, but, where there is a fully expressed love life, never more than that. § 76 There is an unmistakable sign when the union of the two natures of a man and a woman has taken place. It is not the procreation of children, it is not living together only, it is not a joint bank account or any mere superficial unity or congeniality of external (egoistic-social) interests; but it is an emotional reaction at a time of intimate physical communion, a flood of feeling of an absolutely unique character, which, once experienced, leads true lovers to say that nothing in the world they have ever heard of could be in any respect like it—a flood of feeling, which, like the perigee tide, enters and fills every nook and cranny of the being of each, just as the waters of an estuary rise and fill and overflow when the sun and the moon both pull together and the wind blows into the river’s mouth. And the first time that emotional flood tide is experienced is nothing to what later psychosomatic communion may attain. Man and wife looking back on their honeymoon thirty years before realize poignantly how infinitely more exalted and overwhelming is their present-day love communion than were the unsteady, brief and trembling, uncoördinated embraces of their early married life. True, they looked at each other with eyes of love long years before, but such simple, ignorant, artless infantile eyes, that looked without seeing half there was to see. They have learned each other as they never could have learned any two, much less three or more, of the other sex. Each has learned how to give, and that riches consist only in power to give, and that power to give is developed only by giving, just as skill in swimming comes from swimming and not from standing on the shore.