One who goes among these people expecting to find their sex relationships and their feeling with regard to sexual phenomena highly complex and poetical, will be disappointed. The æsthetic and intellectual transfiguration of sexual instinct is the result of a long course of intellectual evolution; and in the race or the individual it, perhaps, more certainly than anything else, indicates the height of development which the man or the society has reached, and the width of the chasm which divides it from the primitive conditions of life. It would be as rational to go into the woods and search on the wild rose-stems for a Maréchal Niel or a Queen of Roses, with their wealth of petals and perfume, as to go into a primitive up-country farmhouse expecting to find the woman's heart humming "Portuguese Sonnets" to her husband; or the man who, having lost his first wife, looks forward through the rest of life to the death which shall at last allow him to sleep beside her, and who shall have found every act of life sanctified by the remembrance of a close intellectual fellowship. These things are an efflorescence which can only appear on the branches very high on the tree of life; perhaps possible only to the philosopher or poet, or to those who are potentially such; and to look in any simple pastoral or agricultural people for the intense and individualized affection which is possible alone to the man or woman in whom the mental functions entirely predominate over the physical, is a delusion. The young Boer, when at sixteen or eighteen he passes from childhood to manhood, looks about him for a female companion. "I am courting three," he may say, "and I am not yet sure which I shall take. So-and-so has the most stock, but she is very plain; so-and-so is pretty and white, but my mother does not like her; so I suppose I shall take so-and-so." Nor is there sometimes more intensity of individualized feeling expressed on the part of the woman. "Will you come to my wedding? I am going to be married in two months' time," a maiden may say. And when it is inquired to whom, she replies that there are several youths courting her, and she intends to decide within the next three or four weeks which she shall have, and has the material for the wedding dress already in her box.