Yet she had still to fathom an even subtler mystery than this: the mystery of sexual love. Why should one man and one woman, out of all the teeming millions of humanity, be irresistibly attracted to each other by a force which none can analyse or define? Why should a woman, confronted with the choice between two men, one of whom possesses every apparent advantage over the other, yet feel her heart go out to that other, and impel her to follow him, even to the leaving of father and mother and home, and all else that has been dear to her? Why in the soul of every true man and woman is Love, when it comes, made Lord of all, and all in all? It is because Love is co-eternal with Life, and these two have loved, perchance wedded, many times before in other lives which they have lived together, and, with the succession of these lives, their love has grown stronger and purer, until "falling in love" is merely a recognition of lovers; unconscious, no doubt, to those who have not progressed far enough in wisdom, but none the less necessary and inevitable for that.[1] Is it not from ignorance of this truth, or wilful denial of this law, that all the miseries of mismarriage come forth? Again the woman has the choice. She obeys the bidding of her own lust of wealth and comfort and social power, or she submits to the pressure of family influence, or the stress of poverty, and crushes--or thinks she does--the ages-old love out of her heart and marries the man she does not love, never has loved, and never can. She has defied the eternal Law of Selection. She has desecrated the sanctity of an immortal soul, and she has defiled the temple of her body. She has sold herself for a price in the market-place, and has become a prostitute endowed by law with a conventional respectability, and for this crime she pays the penalty of unsated heart-hunger. Instead of the fruits of Eden distilling their sweet juices into her blood, the apples of Gomorrah turn perpetually to ashes in her mouth. Often weariness and despair drive her to the brief intoxication of the anodyne of adultery, a further crime which is only the natural consequence of the first. But it must not be thought that women are the only sexual criminals. There are male as well as female prostitutes made respectable by convention, and the debt-burdened man of title who marries to get gold to re-gild his tarnished coronet is the worst of these; for too often he drags an innocent but ignorant maiden down to his own vile level. Yet the chief criminal of all is not the individual, but the Society which not only encourages, but too often compels the crime. For this it also pays the penalty. The collective crime brings the collective curse, for, if human history proves anything, it proves that the Society which persistently denies the Law of Selection, and continually defiles the Altar of Love, in the end goes down through a foul welter of lust and greed and gluttony into the nethermost Pit of Destruction.