If, therefore, we admit on the one hand that the sexual excesses of the female sex are especially grafted on hereditary disposition of character, or are primarily due to strong appetites, we are obliged on the other hand to recognize that the great role played by sexuality in the brain of woman renders it more difficult for her than for man to return to better ways when she has once prostituted herself, or when she has surrendered in any way to sexual licentiousness, even when her original quality was not bad. In man the sexual appetite is much more easily separated than in woman from other instincts, sentiments and intellectual life in general, and possesses in him, however powerful it may be, a much more transient character, which prevents it dominating the whole mental life. I have dwelt so much on this point because it is essential to know the differences which exist between man and woman in this respect, and to take them into account if we wish to give a just and healthy judgment on the sexual question from the social point of view. The more it is our duty to give the same rights to both sexes, the more absurd it is to disregard the profoundness of their differences and to imagine that these can ever be effaced. =Flirtation.=--If we look in an English dictionary for the meaning of the word _flirt_, we find it equivalent to coquetry. But this English term has become fixed and modernized in another sense which has become international, to express the old idea of a series of well-known phenomena which must be clearly distinguished from coquetry. Coquetry, an especially feminine attribute, is not in itself dependent on the sexual appetite; it is an indirect irradiation, purely psychical, and we shall speak of it later on. Flirtation, as we now understand the term, is directly connected with the sexual appetite, and constitutes its external impression in all the wealth of its forms, as much in man as in woman. In a word, flirtation is a polymorphous language which clearly expresses the sexual desires of an individual to the one who awakens these desires, actual coitus alone excepted. Flirtation may be practiced in a more or less unconscious manner. It is by itself neither a psychic attribute nor sexual appetite, for a human being may so hide and overcome his appetites that no one remarks them; and on the contrary, he may simulate sexual appetite without feeling it, or at any rate behave in such a way as to excite it in his partner. Flirtation thus consists in an activity calculated to disclose the eroticism of the subject as well as to excite that of others. It is needless to say that the nature of coquetry disposes to flirtation.