conflict must remain permanent and _insoluble_. In this conviction, many women of genius choose the lesser conflict: marriage without children. Such a relationship occurs not infrequently in our time in this way: a man of feeling through the work of a woman is first moved by her being. The man is in that case often the younger or the less developed. At first, marriage brings both a rich happiness. But later comes a time when the power of the personality of the woman of genius becomes too strong for the man; when he feels himself exhausted by all the sensitiveness and impatience which charge the air about a creative personality with electricity. He has now had enough of the rich spiritual exchange and longs for a woman who is only fresh richness, sunny quiet, easy docility; the now vanished “ingénue” would be the type of woman who most of all could entrance him. In another case, it is the wife who becomes wearied, when the man can no longer keep pace with her development nor afford her new inspiration. The erotic life of the woman as well as of the man of genius exhibits two phases: in one they are attracted by their opposite, in the other by a congeniality of souls; in one phase they have sought sentiment, intimacy, nature; in the other, soul, passion, culture. The order changes in different cases, but the phenomenon repeats itself. What both consciously or unconsciously desire of love is not another individuality to love but only a means of inspiration. Yet one thing may be emphasised: the richer the nature of a woman is and the greater her talents, the more life-determining love will be for her; at one time making her existence desolate, at another time making it fruitful. For the woman of genius is less able than the man to renounce her own fate. This the man is capable of doing, in the midst of passion, without his work suffering thereby in vigour and strength; the woman on the contrary—even the genius—loses more easily her creative impulse in happiness, her creative power in unhappiness.