_Two desires of eros._—Eros consists of two desires, to love and to be loved. The man is more anxious to love, the woman to be loved. She desires to feel that she is admired or rather coveted by men. That woman withers who, in all her life, was never once loved by some man. Even the woman who for moral or morbid reasons renounces libido, will still have the desire to be admired and loved. In her day-dreams the girl pictures to herself an ideal man by whom she wishes to be loved, the man portrays in his imagination the girl he wishes to love. When he meets with his ideal he knows his own mind about his love. He recognizes the goddess upon whose altar he intends to burn his choicest incense. The girl has first to ask her oracle. She plucks the petals of her marguerite, lisping: “He loves me, he loves me not.” The man, more concerned about his own love, wears his heart on his sleeve and feels eager to have the beloved see how passionately it throbs for her. The woman, having first to discover the man’s love, will try to conceal her own emotion in the innermost recesses of her bosom, lest the lover discover her feelings prematurely. The woman is, therefore, a comma, in love affairs, the man a full stop; here, you know where you are; there, read further. The woman is anxious to be loved by the man of her choice, the man mainly asks for the privilege to love her. This difference is mainly based upon the different value love possesses in the eyes of the two sexes. With the man the imagination does not need to come into play before he can look for joys and sorrows, hopes and fears that make up the sum and substance of love. The woman gives far more than her body, she gives her soul, her very self, her all. Another reason for the woman’s desire to be loved lies in her feminine vanity. In the relations of friends the one who desires to be loved rather than to love, is the more egotistic. The preference of the passive part of love to the active unquestionably springs from the root of egotism in human nature. In the relation of the sexes, the desire to be loved arises more or less from the wish to satisfy personal vanity. It is tacitly, although, as a rule, among civilized men erroneously, assumed that personal excellence is the cause of a particular individual of one sex being loved by the other, and that one sex is the better judge of the excellence of the other. Hence the person most deeply loved must of necessity excel his rivals. He must at least possess greater sexual charms which men and women are chiefly proud of. Vain men, for that reason, will boast of the large number of their love affairs and the many hearts broken. For the same reason a woman’s vanity is flattered to be openly preferred and loved by a good, respectable man. In present society only matrimony can satisfy her vanity. For free love can only be clandestine, and clandestine love satisfies only her libido, but not her vanity.