It may be, as I have already suggested, that the woman's point of view is due to her physiology; or it may at least be influenced by it. At least, I am convinced that to the woman the sense that physical union is _only_ justified by already existent spiritual union, is the normal one. I believe that, however incapable she may be of explaining it, and however her power of reasoning may be vitiated by wrong ideas about the sexual relation, she does instinctively recoil from its use when its reason for existence is not there. She may attribute her reluctance to the fact that she is too womanly (_sic_), too spiritually minded to have any desire for sexual relations at all; her husband may attribute it to coldness of temperament or "modesty." In fact, it is due to the cause I have stated, and if she had never been called upon to give her body except when her own desire for the "outward and visible sign" of an "inward and spiritual grace" demanded it, her husband would have found that she was not temperamentally defective, but as good a lover as he. No one who lives in the world at all can fail to understand that in every human relationship, and supremely in this one, there must be much mutual accommodation, much give and take, a great gentleness to every claim made in the name of love. All I am concerned to do here is to help to clear up misunderstandings. It is no claim that I put forward that the woman's point of view is superior to the man's: merely that they seem to me a little different. A man who is conscious of jarring, who finds himself a little at cross-purposes with the woman he loves, and yet knows that the jarring is merely superficial and the love profound, may easily feel that to ask and offer once more the supreme expression of that love is the best way to transcend the temporary lack of sympathy and restore love to its right place and true proportion. Who shall say that he is wrong? Is it not certain that the expression of love does intensify and deepen love? Is not a sacrament the means of grace as well as its symbol. Yet let him be warned. He may easily seem to his wife to be contenting himself with the symbol without the reality, the body without the soul. If she understands him, she may go with him. If she does not, no yielding on her part--no physical passion that he may arouse--will quite stifle the protest which tells her that she suffers spiritual violation. Do you remember the cry of Julie in "The Three Daughters of M. Dupont"? "_It is a nightly warfare in which I am always defeated_." That her physical nature is suborned to aid in the conquest only increases for her the sense of degradation.