Individualism has made love deeper and at the same time increased its difficulties. It has called forth an enhanced consciousness of our own nature, our own moods; it has created new spiritual conditions and—as already pointed out—set in vibration innumerable formerly latent feelings of pleasure and aversion. But our personal irritable sensitiveness has not yet been developed to the point of a corresponding delicacy of feeling for the equally sensitive spiritual life of others. The capacity for giving and sacrificing has not grown at an equal pace with that of accepting and demanding. Of love’s double heart-beat—the finding one’s self, and the forgetting one’s self in another—the first is now considerably more advanced than the second. Not until those women who are absorbed in self-analysis combine their own personal store of life’s riches, their individual diversity, their unique spirituality with the sunny, healthy peace, the self-sacrificing devotion of older times, will their new development render them more powerful than the women who preceded them. It is a healthy sign that men and women exchange experiences and ideas on these subjects with a frankness that was never known before; that they are much less affected before marriage, as women indeed have ceased to be so after marriage. There was a heroic kind of affectation, of which Mrs. Carlyle was the typical example, but in itself it was borrowed from man’s ethical development. Nevertheless one would often wish that the young wives of the present day possessed more of the old-fashioned gift of conceding the desires of the beloved with a happy smile, instead of insisting on their own. The modern woman will not feign anything for the sake of occasional peace or understanding. And she is right—when anything of real importance in the domain of ideas or will is at stake; she is doubly right in holding that all the lies and ruses which married “happiness” enforced on the wives of an older time were degrading to both parties; that what was thus gained was no real gain. Nothing is more true than that the souls which are parted by a lack of perfect frankness never belonged to one another; that complete mutual confidence is the true sign of union. Nothing could be wiser than the modern woman’s desire to see life with her own eyes, not—as was the case with the women who went before her—only with those of a husband. But has she also retained the power of seeing everything with the thought of what the loved one’s eyes will find in it?