The fetishism of the single sense quality is an important consideration here. Harvey O’Higgins in _The Secret Springs_ shows how even a part of the person or a phase of the woman’s personality may take on an overplus of emotional tension in the mind of the man, such as to make him think he has found the paragon of all the virtues in the first woman he sees having this peculiarity. If his mother’s hands were especially beautiful, it is likely that beauty of hands will play a big part in his unconscious selection of a life partner, and that homely hands will repel him in a girl otherwise eminently fitted to be his mate. The deep emotions experienced by a little boy in seeing his mother in evening dress in the ruddy glow of a red lampshade in the drawing-room gave him a depth of response to that one vision that made him twenty years later fall suddenly in love with a girl whom he saw illuminated by the red hall light in her father’s house. One is partly, but only partly, conscious of one’s fetishes. No man except the most self-conscious student of his own mental reactions can tell exactly why he likes or dislikes _anything_. He can give many reasons; but the real _cause_ lies in the unconscious memory he has forgotten—a memory of some pleasurable emotion of exceeding depth that has occurred possibly a quarter of a century before. But whatever may be the real _cause_ of the disproportionate emphasis on certain features, mannerisms, or mental or physical habits of his wife, the fact remains. It may well be questioned that any such overemphasis on the _way_ she speaks or smiles, or on some peculiar catch in the breath, _should_ make him lose control of himself, but it does. It is not necessarily that he is set to go off in ecstasies at the occurrence of any of these factors, as much as that through his own experience he sets himself thus in a sort of lock combination. § 120 In reality this setting is something that should take place during and not before marriage, if it must take place at all in a man. It were much better if it took place not at all in the husband but in the wife. This overvaluation of a smile, a dimple, a look, a timbre of the voice, a perfume or froufrou, is used by men even before marriage as a sexual stimulus when in reality none is needed. The question of most vital importance is not so much, however, the shape of eyebrow, the laughter rhythm, or other mannerism or characteristic of a woman that causes a man to decide that he wants to marry her, for that is in most cases in the unconscious, and therefore actually inaccessible to him except through much more study than he is able or willing to give it. The fetishes made by the unconscious, kept in the unconscious, and causing selection on the man’s part are as nothing in importance to the fetishes that he had innately or has acquired that give overvaluation for him to certain phases of the love episode itself.