Upon the answer to these questions of conscience will depend the success of the new woman in guiding the development of love in the direction of her will. For only by herself loving better will she gradually humanise man’s passion and liberate it from the blind force of the blood, which makes of the capercailzie’s play or the rivalry of stags a spectacle beautiful in its animality, but, on the other hand, renders man’s love bestial. Those who think that the healthy strength of nature will be thereby enfeebled are as foolish as those who try to prove that the artistic instinct in the woodcock’s note is healthier and stronger than that which created Beethoven’s symphonies. But it is not sufficient that woman should take the lead and appoint the goal. She must herself be developed for the task, and that not only in the direction just mentioned. Her soul is as yet no sure guide to her senses, nor her senses to her soul. So much the less can she then be a guide to man’s soul or senses, which moreover she frequently fails to understand and therefore unhesitatingly condemns—for the sins to which she herself has not unfrequently seduced him! The new woman demands purity of man. But has she any suspicion as to how her treatment, on the one hand, of the awkward and uncertain youth, on the other, of the experienced and confident “lady-killer” type, acts upon the former, who is perhaps striving after erotic purity in the hope of being rewarded by the happy smile of a woman, but who sees that woman treat him with haughty commiseration while, on the other hand, she regards the leopard’s spots of his rival with admiration? One may ask whether all young women who now express their detestation of the impurity in man’s sexual habits are themselves guided only by a soft and noble joy in giving pleasure. Do they never permit themselves the most despicable of hypocrisies, that of love? So long as “pure” women take pleasure in the cruel sport of the cat; so long as with the facile changes of mood of the serpentine dancer they evade the responsibilities of their flirtations; so long as they delight in provoking jealousy as a homage to themselves, so long will they be helping to brew the hell-broth around which men will celebrate the witches’ sabbath in the company of the bat-winged bevies of the night. There are more men led astray by “pure” than by “impure” women. And not even those women who are pure in the true sense of the word are free from blame in this. Woman—for whom love is a life-and-death matter in a much deeper sense than for man—experiences on the approach of love those tremblings that follow a sunrise for which one has lain awake and waited. Her physico-psychical timidity takes on by turns the expressions, incomprehensible to the man who loves, of dumb avoidance, of abrupt change, of empty girlish giggling, of sullen misunderstanding. And all that is contradictory—not that which is mysterious—in woman stirs the unrest in a man’s blood.