Women now older tell me of the fact that for the first years of their married life they could give no response, but when they were respectively twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one or more, they began first to feel they were truly women. Young husbands have written to me of their distress that their wives (aged about twenty to twenty-three), delightful girls in every respect, seemed utterly incapable of any response in the marital orgasm. Sometimes this depends on her conformation, but such an incapacity I often attribute to the girl’s marriage being premature. When she is twenty-seven or twenty-eight perhaps her internal development will be complete, and she will then be ripe for the full enjoyment of marriage: but if instead of a considerate husband she marries one who merely uses her, she stands little chance ever of knowing the proper relation of wifehood and motherhood. These facts which I could vary with details from individual experiences, in my opinion, indicate a profound truth in the development of the human race. It is this: not only do the higher races of human beings have a prolonged childhood and youth, but the most highly evolved, mentally, physically and racially, of our girls have not finished their potential growth into maturity until they are in the neighbourhood of thirty years of age. Does this then mean that all marriage should be deferred till so late? By no means, nor is the above conclusion any reflection on the type of girl who ripens much more quickly. I fully recognize that from the point of view of their sex potentialities some girls are complete women at seventeen or eighteen, and that they may then be very strongly sexed indeed. Such women should marry young. The marked differentiation of type of these very notably different women can be traced through many other aspects of their lives. I consider, for instance, the type of whom I spoke in Chapter XII (who has a natural desire for union, representing the highest and most complex human union, the union of three) belongs very frequently to the late maturing and the most highly evolved form of femininity. It should be recognized that there are among us not only different races, but that in the same stock, sometimes in the same family of apparently no specially mixed ancestry, we may find one or more members of the late maturing, others of the early maturing type. Sometimes of two sisters, the elder may perhaps be still in mind a girl while her younger sister is a woman, as can be observed by any one with a large circle of acquaintances. It would be well, I think, if humanity, whose proper study is mankind, were at least to know themselves sufficiently well to realize the existence of such different types, and their possible potential value as well as their differing needs. The energy at present wasted in the acrid statement of conflicting views would be so much better spent on the careful recording and recognizing of varying types.