The attitude of one of the women who confessed her intimate feelings to me is typical of those of this type, and is illuminating. She is a woman of unusually gifted brain, well endowed physically and a normally healthy mother in every respect; she is noted for a peculiar beauty and sweetness of disposition, and an unusually high degree of sensitive appreciation of beauty and goodness. In conversation she said to me: “You know I feel so ashamed and degraded by myself, but just at the time when I felt I ought to be sacred from these things, I more ardently desired my husband than I had done throughout all my married life of fifteen years.” She then told me that her husband who had been truly devoted to her all his life was particularly considerate and thoughtful for her during her time of expectant motherhood, and that when she tentatively hinted at her wish for union with him he refused tenderly on the grounds that the higher standard for men was to share, however difficult it was, in the nine months of complete abstinence. He said that, for the sake of the child and herself, he must refuse. Her desire, however, again recurred, much to her own shame and mortification, because she felt that what her husband said really represented the highest accepted standard of pre-natal conduct. Quite a number of rather similar and also exceptionally endowed women have confessed to me in almost the same terms the same feeling. Before I indicate my conclusions, let us briefly consider some of the surrounding circumstances of this problem. As I said in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, the nobler and better men have been carried away by a certain type of woman into thinking that it is man’s share of the difficulties and self-sacrifice of parenthood that he should entirely sacrifice what is spoken of as “his desires.” In my opinion, this attitude involves two profound fallacies. The first fallacy is that the act of sex union is to meet only “his desires”; it is not. Completed union is something infinitely greater: it is a consummation jointly achieved by both the man and his wife. This attitude I make clear in my book, _Married Love_ and in my new _Gospel_ addressed to the Bishops at Lambeth. And I must postulate in this, my present book, the far reaching effects on the bodily, spiritual and mental health of a man and woman concerned in this complex sex union. The truth is that the husband who mutually and considerately unites with his wife when she can accept him is not merely gratifying his own desire, he is enriching her whole system as well as his own through this mutual alchemy.