Let us remember that courtship is, as Darwin said, “a prolonged affair,” and that coyness is a means to its prolongation. And let us remember that in simple cases, as also in more complex matters, the intelligent exercise of choice depends upon what Dr. Stout terms the acquisition of meaning. “The chicken does not, at first,” he says,[155] “distinguish between what is edible and what is not. This it has to learn by experience. It will at the outset peck at and seize all worms and caterpillars indiscriminately. There is a particular caterpillar called the cinnabar caterpillar. When this is first presented to the chicken it is pecked at and seized, like other similar objects. But as soon as it is fairly seized it is dropped in disgust. When next the chicken sees the caterpillar, it looks at it suspiciously, and refrains from pecking. Now, what has happened in this case? The sight of the cinnabar caterpillar re-excites the total disposition left behind by the previous experience of pecking at it, seizing it, and ejecting it in disgust. Thus the effect of these experiences [what I have termed the conscious situation] is revived. The sight of the cinnabar caterpillar has acquired a _meaning_.” Take now the case of a coy hen bird, to whom several males pay court. The sight of this one, behaving after his kind, excites in small degree the sexual impulse and emotions. Her heart beats but little the faster for all his antics, her respiratory rhythm is scarcely affected, her feathers, like her feelings, remain comparatively unruffled. He has acquired meaning from the reaction to his presence; it is not, however, a very attractive meaning. But that other, perhaps from mere persistency, perhaps because he is more “vigorous, defiant, and mettlesome” (she, at any rate, certainly knows not why), deeply stirs her organic being, sets her all aglow, and breaks down the barriers of her coyness. And this he does because he is the centre of a conscious situation which has acquired, through her experience of his presence, a meaning and an interest that are at last irresistibly attractive. It is a choice from impulse, not the result of deliberation; but it is a choice which is determined by the emotional meaning of the conscious situation. And it is the reiterated revival of the associated emotional elements which generates an impulse sufficiently strong to overcome her instinctive coyness and reluctance.