Physical love, reproduction--Emotional love, a satisfaction or enjoyment--Scientific curiosity about love--Philosophic and sympathetic understanding of all sorts of love--Imaginative love makes the consciousness elemental--The glory and danger of imagination--Vicarious imagination in reading--The middle-aged suppress imagination in the young--Saintly beauty--Philosophy, Criticism, Sensuousness, and commonplace life--Madness, Folly, Drink, Drugging--The imaginative man is womanly in these respects--Weiningen’s _Sex and Character_--Forel, Bloch--Mr. Austen Chamberlain 78 IX EXPERIMENTS Solitude and family--The home--The gay societies of the past--Solemn experiments in love--Civilization a protection from, or concealment of, the animal necessities--Eating in public--Privacy--When truth is goodness--Useful conventions--Saint Teresa and her men friends--Lead the way if you want to make an experiment; if you want to follow anyone, it is a sign you should follow the herd 84 X THE SAVAGE, THE BARBARIAN, THE CIVILIZED The Spaniard, the Russian, the Parisian--Intellect, art, morals, religion, and women--Conspicuousness--The fight against the patriarchal goat--The passing love--The necessity of many friends--The real play of the life to come 91 PREFACE There is a great difficulty in writing of the women of the first ten years of the twentieth century. This is to be the Woman’s Century. In it she is to awake from her long sleep and come into her kingdom; but when I look about me I find myself surrounded by the most terribly contradictory facts. We know there is to be a revaluation of all values--we know that old rubbish is to be burnt up, that the social world is to be melted down and remoulded “nearer to the heart’s desire”; but at the same time we have to recognize that in spite of the enthusiasm of the alchemists and the transmuters of base metal into gold, the main body of society is as yet hardly aware of the fire that is to burn it. In writing of this change I have to explain to one set of women, who will think me outrageously advanced, my opinions of another set of women, who will think me absurdly conventional. I think I had better own up at once that as an artist I am prejudiced against the exhibition of the necessities of nature. I am like Mr. Galsworthy’s little toy terrier, who disliked the strong odours of real life. Yet at the same time I have a passion for the discussion of life; the salt of wit makes me enjoy the strongest flavours. So I present myself and my limitations to my readers, hoping that my fervid faith in the delight of the communion of thoughts, emotions, and sympathies will make up for my lack of conviction in some other directions.