=Ego in Sex Guise.= Certain customs of ages past are sexual in appearance but the egotistical motive back of them is easily discovered. Take the right of the first night, which in several parts of the world survived until modern times. The tribal chief or the lord of the manor had the right to spend a night with every bride within his jurisdiction before the rightful husband was allowed to enjoy his marital privileges. That custom made the first born of every family the putative descendent of the chief and fostered a deeper loyalty to him among his followers. Even as economic exhibitionism prompts people to spend at show eating places sums in no way commensurate with their hunger, or to buy diamonds which are not in any way beautiful but only symbolical of the wearer's indifference to returns on his investments, egotism causes many men to pretend sexual cravings which they do not feel. Many stage women, actresses, singers, dancers, etc., are kept by men whose sex life is at low ebb but who parade their "conquest" before their associates or perfect strangers to demonstrate their sexual and financial powers. =Fatherhood.= A constant craving for fatherhood is not infrequently a neurotic symptom, an egotistical desire to compensate for low sexual potency. Physicians and druggists dispensing aphrodisiacs can testify to the prevalence of large families in the homes of almost impotent men. The man who can fulfill his sexual duties once a year for fifteen years and foils his mate's attempts at contraception, is quite able to raise a very large family and to pass among his associates for a very virile man. The sight of his numerous progeny silences any scepticism as to his sexual vitality. Some of the most astonishing vagaries in the choice of a mate are traceable to purely egotistical cravings. Neurotic women married to a superior man may refuse to express any sexual joy in his arms. They remain frigid in his company and then give themselves to some rather inferior individual to whom they feel superior and in whose arms they show the most complete abandon. The medical and lay press very often relates cases of fine looking and apparently normal women who marry idiots or morons. Their sense of inferiority and their fear of ego-defeat makes them seek inferior mates unlikely to dominate them in any respect. Some young women conceal their morbid desire to mate with a degenerate under a philanthropic mask. They pretend, when marrying a drunkard or a thief, that their aim is to regenerate him. And so do some young men with an inferiority complex explain to their family and friends that they have married a menial or a prostitute to reclaim her.