Every reasonably attractive woman who has been called upon to face the facts of life knows that men are impelled towards women by a force of desire that they call over-powering. It is not over-powering, as thousands of clean-minded men have proved, it is no more over-powering than the desire to gamble or the desire to take drugs; it can be conquered as these other desires have been conquered; but centuries of wayward living under relaxed standards (the double standard) have made men believe that it is over-powering and they act accordingly. And women yield on one pretense or another, smilingly or tearfully--_how can they resist the dominant will of half the human race?_ I find this in my diary heavily underscored: "_How can the same act be a sin for half the race and not a sin for the other half? For centuries men have proclaimed that women must not give themselves to men, but men may give themselves to women. Is there any greater absurdity? Wine may mix with water, but water must not mix with wine._" If these sex-complaisant women were really filled with remorse, burdened with a sense of shame, we should all know it. Their eyes, their voices, their daily lives would reveal it. Could a million women be in physical pain, say from starvation, without all the world knowing it? Is pain of the soul less torturing than pain of the body? The fact is that these women are not in spiritual pain. They regard what they have done (often regretfully) as a result of impossible conditions in the world today, a world controlled by men. I can speak about these things with a certain authority, since, for years, I sympathized with the self-indulgent point of view, in fact I lived in an artistic and Bohemian _milieu_ where many of my friends followed the line of least resistance. I may even confess that I might have gone with the current, had I not seen the harm and unhappiness that resulted. _It does not pay to be self-indulgent._ "LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION" The suspicion that many women are disingenuous in regard to these irregularities of conduct was forced upon me some years ago in a conversation with Kendall Brown, who, for all his eccentricities, is a keen observer of life. I give the conversation at some length just as I wrote it down in my diary: