Of this habit there are various explanations; the prevalent one regards the spider as an anomalous exception; the ferocity and superiority of size in the female not easily to be explained. This is, I think, not so. Is it not rather a picture, with the details crudely emphasised, of the action of Life-Force of which the sexes are both the helpless victims? Whether we look backward to the beginning, where the exhausted male-cell seeks the female in incipient sexual union, or onwards through the long stages of sex-evolution to our own love-passions, this is surely true. Let me try to make this clearer by an example. It would seem but a small step from the female spider, so ruthlessly eating up her lover, to the type of woman celebrated by Mr. Bernard Shaw's immortal Ann. I recall a woman friend saying to me once, "We may not like it, and, of course, we refuse to own to it, but there is something of Ann in every woman." I need not recall to you Ann's pursuit of her victim, Tanner, nor his futile efforts to escape. Here, as so often he has done, Mr. Shaw has presented us in comedy with a philosophy of life. You believe, perhaps, the fiction, still brought forward by many who ought to know better, that in love woman is passive and waits for man to woo her. I think no woman in her heart believes this. She knows, by instinct, that Nature has unmistakably made her the predominant partner in all that relates to the perpetuation of the race; she knows this in spite of all fictions set up by men. Have they done this, as Mr. Shaw suggests, to protect themselves against a too humiliating aggressiveness of the woman in following the driving of the Life-Force? This pretence of male superiority in the sexual relation is so shallow that it is strange how it can have imposed on any one. I wish to state here quite definitely what I hold to be true; the condition of female superiority with which sexuality began has in this connection persisted. In every case the relation between woman and man is the same--she is the pursuer, he the pursued and disposed of. Nothing can or should alter this. The male from the very beginning has been of use from Nature's point of view by assisting the female to carry on life. It is the fierce hunger of the male, increasing in strength through the long course of time, which places him in woman's power. Man is the slave of woman, often when least he thinks so, and still woman uses her power, even like the spider, not infrequently, for his undoing.