beloved, the mistress, of the man who wishes no community of life, but only happy hours. Many more women still strike the possibilities of erotic happiness out of their plan of life, because they have not experienced the ideal love of which they dreamed, or else could not realise it.[3] Sometimes their doubt, in regard to the duration of love and the unity of souls, decides them, another time the longing for a personal life-work is the reason for their determination—a life-work for which these women have suffered so keenly, been deprived of so much, and have so struggled, that it has become passionately dear to them, and they feel that a complete renunciation of the erotic life is easier than the torment of being “drawn and quartered,” as the death penalty of the Middle Ages was called—a quartering between profession, husband, home, and children. And the result usually demonstrates that celibacy is wiser than the compromise. It is most frequently the case,—in Europe at least,—if the work of the unmarried woman had no personal character, and if the home is not dependent upon the earnings of the wife, that she gives up her professional work after her marriage. Against this sacrifice, however, the higher erotic idealism has begun to rebel and has, thereby, come into conflict with the conservative direction of feminism, which while planning to make the wife equal to the husband, adheres firmly to the present marriage as protection for wife and children. It is this point of view that is condemned by the new idealism. For it “protection” signifies, in its innermost meaning, that the man buys love and the woman sells it, which is considered “moral,” while it is considered immoral for a man to sell love and for a woman to buy it. The “protection” in this relationship has as result that the “virtue” of the maid is synonymous with untouched sexual nature, and that of the wife, with physical fidelity; while the “virtue” of the youth and the man is judged from an entirely different point of view.