Turning from the historical back to the psychological point of view--in one of those circles of cause and effect that are composed now of cultural inheritance or tradition, now of psychological trend or disposition--the American case of sex, whether a case of adolescence or of senescence, may be said to present symptoms of arrested development. Together with the non-realism of childish or senile formula, there is here the kind of emotionalism which checks emotional vitality and which is fed upon the sense of crisis; we may call it crisis-emotion. Life at large, the sex life in particular, is presented as a series of crises preceded and followed by a static condition, and in these conventional times of crisis only, the times when the labels are being attached, are the emotions aroused. In the intervals, in the stretches between betrothal, marriage, birth, christening, or divorce, there is little or no sense of change--none of the emotions that correspond to changing relations and are expressions of personal adjustment. The emotions of crisis are statutory, pre-determined, conventionalized; neither for oneself nor for others do they make any demands upon imagination, or insight, or spiritual concern. Here in this psychology of crisis is the clue--before mentioned--to an understanding of the freedom allowed our youth, of “bundling,” as the Colonials termed it, or, in current phrase, “petting.” In general, “keeping company” is accounted one kind of a relationship, marriage, another--one characterized by courtship without consummation, the other by consummation without courtship. Between the two kinds of relationship there is no transition, it is assumed, except by convention or ritual. So inrooted is this social attitude that the young cannot escape adopting it, at least the very young to whom, at any rate, uncritical conservatism seems to be natural. Indeed the taboo on unritualized consummation partakes enough of the absolutism of the taboo, shall we say, on incest, to preclude any risk of individual youthful experimentation or venture across the boundary lines set by the Elders. Given these boundary lines, given a psychology of crisis, all too readily the sex relations, in marriage or out, become stale, flat, colourless, or of the nature of debauch, which is only another aspect of crisis-psychology. Sex relations perforce become limited to two conventions, marriage and prostitution. Prostitute or wife, the conjugal or the disorderly house, these are the alternatives. In formulaic crisis-psychology there may be no other station of emotional experiment or range of emotional expression.