"The passivity of the female in love," it has been said wisely by Marro in his fine work _La Puberta_, "is the passivity of the magnet, which in its apparent immobility is drawing the iron towards it. An intense energy lies behind such passivity, an absorbed pre-occupation in the end to be attained."[313] In the examples we have studied of the courtships of birds we saw that it is by no means a universal law that the male is eager and the female coy. I need only recall the instance noted by Darwin[314] in which a wild duck forced her love on a male pintail, and such cases, as is well known, are frequent. High-bred bitches will show sudden passions for low-bred or mongrel males. According to breeders and observers it is the female who is always much more susceptible of sentimental selection; thus it is often necessary to deceive mares. Among many primitive peoples it is the woman who takes the initiative in courtship. In New Guinea, for instance, where women hold a very independent position, "the girl is always regarded as the seducer. 'Women steal men.' A youth who proposed to a girl would be making himself ridiculous, would be called a woman, and laughed at by the girls. The usual method by which a girl proposes is to send a present to the youth by a third party, following this up by repeated gifts of food; the young man sometimes waits a month or two, receiving presents all the time, in order to assure himself of the girl's constancy before decisively accepting her advances."[315] In the face of this, and many similar cases, it becomes an absurdity to continue a belief in the passivity of the female as a natural law of the sexes. Such openness of conduct in courtship is, of course, impossible except where woman holds an entirely independent position. Still, it would not be difficult to bring forward similar manifestations of the initiative being taken by the woman--though often exercised unconsciously as the expression of an instinctive need--in the artificial courtships of highly civilised peoples. But enough has perhaps been said; and such examples can, I doubt not, be readily supplied by each of my readers for themselves. I will only remark that the true nature of the passivity of the woman in courtship is made abundantly clear from the ease with which the pretence is thrown off in every case where the necessity arises.