For, on the mountain top, thoughts come to each—thoughts that can occur in _no other_ situation. The difficulties encountered and overcome make them inseparable soul mates. The refusal of her husband to leave her and go up without her endears him more to her than presents of many jewels. It shows her he has the only strength a woman can respect, the strength to reserve his strength and to use it for and with her, a strength which all unconsciously she must test at every step of the ascent. If this strength is found wanting, she will be left forlorn, the most wretched of living things, far more miserable than any female animal. If it is found present, it will make her the happiest of mortals, happy beyond words in her defeat in the contest of strength, yearning to make him the father of her children. To both of them come deep thoughts, those of the one reflected in the multitudinous facets of the personality of the other, thoughts deep into the past, thoughts looking far into the future, thoughts corresponding in depth to the vastness of the prospects before them as they turn now east, now south. A realization of the greatness of the world will come to them, of the minute littleness of lonely atoms of humanity, a realization that this aspect of nature alone is the one view of life that enables each to know the other deeply and to be a complete unity instead of solitary demi-humans each longing for an unseen other. § 126 To revert to the concept of fetishism one may use the mountain-climbing symbolism of the love episode and say that almost anything on the ascent may be used as, and become habitual as, a fetish capable of causing the husband to leave his wife on the trail and hurry forward to the peak that has a thousand ecstatic views. She may use any of a number of suggestive arguments or mannerisms or actions to convince him if she can that it is his duty to leave her, no matter how harmful may be his abandoning her for his own erotic abandon. She may tell him that he must get there so as not to miss the setting (or rising) sun, or a rainbow, or a nuance of cloud forms, obscured from where they are, halfway up the trail. Of course, he too, unless he has been convinced of the childishness of his act, may think there is some reason why he cannot or should not wait for her, halfway, three-quarters, nine-tenths, perhaps, of the way up. At the very boulder he may be persuaded to take this last jump alone, and indeed it were a pity if, having brought her so far, he should leave her, walled by the boulder from at least half the complete view. Some women would petulantly begin the descent, forever unknowing what was the husband’s experience in looking over the half of the circumference of horizon impossible for the wife to see. § 127