“We cannot part for hours. This sandy shore, warm with an August sun, shall be our couch, remote from interruption. You are mine and I am yours for now and evermore. Not till I know you all, and you feel me pervading all the regions of your soul, shall we be able then to take anew the threads of our existence in the world and weave with them a common robe for both in which enclosed we act toward our fellows, a single person binary in form.” * * * * * “My breathing now is calm like yours; our blood is throbbing softly in our veins, we two went through a fire together, keen, that welded our two spirits into one—inseparable, self-contained, at rest. “Are other men and women thus close fused, each through the other’s eyes beholding life? If not, dear one, the only other joy, not yet by us slow tasted, is to look and see how we can make them also feel the deep-down inner satisfaction pierce the very roots of their own being too, without which we should lack companionship, and feel ourselves unique and lonely. Thus, by throwing this same brilliant light of life with which we have ourselves been newly filled, about us, we can see what ne’er before we saw back in the times when naught we knew of this glad melting each in other’s soul here on the sandy rock-bound ocean shore, where wave and gravel mingle, air and sea and sun and sky; one universal touch and penetration of each other’s heart. Now we are whole that fragments were before.” § 82 The rationalistic thought may occur to some men that a woman’s all can be taken at one love episode. It may come from her uttering words to the effect that she is all his. If _his_ means _with his destructive mark on it_ she is utterly his, to be sure, if he has ruined her. But by a perfect love episode one can ruin only the egoistic-social value of this woman for some other man. For any other man her sexual value would be only increased by the proper kind of love episode. But her erotic value is something that can exist only for the man whom she loves and who loves her. The first properly erotic love episode can never destroy or ruin but only create, or begin the creation, of a woman out of a gynecoid female. A true woman according to the use of the term in this book is a female who has become fused with a male. Then she becomes a woman and he a man. The nature of this fusion has been discussed elsewhere. § 83 As a woman’s all cannot be taken at one love episode, except that “all” which is constituted by her strictly egoistic-social property value, it follows that in the true erotic sense, nothing is taken unless possibly as one should chip a piece of marble from a block out of which one was to carve a statue of the Goddess of Love. The fragment of marble chiselled away at the first stroke of the hammer is no part of the statue. § 84