A woman who marries a widower has to go through a pain which will be deep in proportion as her love is personal. She will then wish to be not only her husband’s last, but also his first love; she suffers from all the memories they have not in common. She would fain have sat by his cradle and received his first smile; she longs to have played with him as a sister, to have shared as a friend his troubles and his joys. She envies all who have been able to see him at those stages of his life and in those spiritual conditions that she has not seen. Above all she envies the woman who first saw him made happy by the love she gave him. But all these sufferings do not bring her to regard the beloved as morally sunken, because before her he has been the husband of another woman. And the same must hold good of earlier relations of love. The man may have developed, through a former marriage or free connection, his powers of giving a personal love, or he may, in the same way, have lost them. If no baseness is connected with these earlier experiences, if he has not degraded himself to voluntary division of his erotic nature—and bought love is always such a degradation—or to contemptible duplicity; if he has not treated any woman as a means, but received and given personality, then he does not enter “impure” into his marriage, even if he has not evidence of abstinence. At present it is unfortunately often the case that men enter into marriage with deep stains from earlier connections, and it is this circumstance that gives the demand for purity its general applicability.