We forget that perhaps four-fifths of the misery that follows in the train of sex-fulfilment is due to this mental and moral “diphobia” acquired in the days of adolescence in the unassisted struggle with the awakening and entirely misunderstood sex-impulse. We may forget, but few and happy are they who escape the effects of that encounter. According to our temperaments it has made us sedulous puritans and unconscious hypocrites, passionless neuters, or careless cynics and voluptuaries. And we are all of us to some extent marked and dirtied for ever. Deep and ineffaceable in us are the records of our disastrous early grapple with a great organic impulse which no one taught us to understand. I am strongly of opinion that the tendency, so prevalent among women, to regard love as a twofold thing, one part of which is physical and evil and the other part spiritual and good, is almost diagnostic in an individual of a disharmony arising from an ancient reaction against sex, caused by some hindering influence or shock, encountered at the opening of the conscious sexual life. The tremendous force that awakens in soul and body in these early years, and that with wise control and comprehension might be tended till in due course it flowers into Love, is early shorn of its splendour. Its whispered intimations of wondrous things to come fall on deaf ears. Taught to regard it as a malignant enemy that may destroy, instead of the most sacred and wonderful agency in human life, we enter into a hopeless struggle to eliminate the most basal part of our nature, or fawn before it in furtive and shameful surrender. So most of us, embittered by the degradation of this struggle, _whether it be won or lost_, grow up to view with distrust what we absurdly call the “physical side of love.” We, and especially women, accept it resignedly as an unavoidable baseness in the grain of Love. We forget that the baseness is in us and not in Love. _Love has no physical side, or mental side, or spiritual side._ It is a unity upon which we lay sacrilegious hands when we make an artificial separation into physical and spiritual. We do this because of our own impurity, and because of the hurts we have suffered. We can no longer look at Love without furtively scanning his garments for the stains of Lust. We have created Lust. Lust is a morbid by-product in the evolution of Love. It is this that we have suffered. CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XVI A CONTINUATION OF THE LAST CHAPTER, WITH AN ATTEMPT TO SUGGEST A REMEDY