The eroding operations carried on by these mongrel degenerated brains cannot help but have a poisonous effect, especially upon the minds of young girls. While in the literature of half a century ago the heroine represented the fundamental type of woman, who is a mother of men, calling out men’s sacrifice and sacrificing herself for them, without calculation or barter, the heroine of the contemporary novel gives herself up to voluptuous excesses. The absence of chastity is considered a sign of the warmth of her feeling, moral decrepitude is called by the doubtful name “self-assertion,” and the exaggerated taste for self-indulgence is termed “self-expression.” Feminine selfishness is represented as an enviable instead of a base quality. Under such circumstances true love must, indeed, be a rare occurrence. More fatal even to true love are the activities of the immoral plays, because they are so deceptive and disingenuous and sail under the guise of moral reforms. There are first the comic plays, nowadays filling most of the stages, which treat immorality as a subject for jocularity, and where an unchaste situation is made the subject of a jest. Then there are some serious plays where sin and the life of immorality are idealized. The career of the courtesan is pictured as a life of gentleness, refinement and renunciation. (La Dame aux Camélias.) In recent times a third kind of immoral plays has made its appearance upon the stage where immoral situations are portrayed, without regard to time-honored conventionalities, with such exactness that the warnings against the evils fail to fulfill their purpose. Another blow fatal to true love, caused by the reading of contemporary literature, is the increase of the young girl’s natural vanity.[AN] The constant descriptions in most modern novels of the struggle over women and the enthusiasm felt at gaining her, says Nordau, increase her natural tendency to regard love as the single aim and substance of the life of human beings and intensify her natural partiality for herself to the degree of ambitious mania and self-deification. She actually imagines that the possession of her would be providential of more than earthly bliss. The pampered overcivilized modern woman finds in this pseudo-literature only lovers who are sacrificing to the divinity of beauty and who are constantly listening to the music of the stars, and she imagines that she also ought to be wooed by gods and spend her life in an earthly paradise. When after the wedding the mirage, she once thought was the eternal land of promise, has faded, she remains permanently shocked at finding only a man where she was looking for an angel as mate. When the longing for sensual satisfaction has been appeased, both lovers find that they have no more to discover and grow fickle and hunger for a change.