(G1) A woman may marry a man who is wholly positive, healthy, and therefore quite savoury (such men get ever more rare, but they are still to be found). Very early in her married life, however, she discovers that, through some cause which she of course cannot fathom, her husband is a person utterly unfit to make her his wife in the only way in which her instincts and senses easily accept the rôle—that is to say, as the yielding partner to an impetuous, masterful, and at the same time skilful initiator. Although he is not negative by nature, he has been brought up negatively. He fears and shuns what he should be most eager to experience. His timidity and awkwardness are infectious. He proves himself not only unmasterly; he convinces her that he is a bungler—often a bungler more terrified than she is herself. A relationship which should have been but a means of raising their courting happiness to ecstasy becomes instead either frigid and frightened post-marital virginity for weeks after marriage,[58] which proves disastrous to their love and ruinous to their nerves; or else, a consummation which is so hopelessly clumsy, hurried and nervous, and so distasteful to either party, that it is repeated as seldom as possible, and is always followed by the most bewildering disenchantment. I have previously explained that to the decent girl the act of consummation seems acceptable and right only if purified by fire. She does not need to be in the least influenced by Puritanical prejudices in order to hold this attitude. It is the natural outcome of her instincts, as they have been formed throughout the ages. The bulk of the ancestors in her line, for millions of years, on the female side, having encountered the proper impetuosity and fire in the male, which carries all before it—that prehensile and initiatory masterfulness that belongs by nature to the male’s share in the act of consummation—this is what her racial memory leads her to expect, this alone is what gives her that clean joy in sex, that light-hearted innocence in sex, without which her married life is but a torment. Yet now she finds herself with a creature who far from showing any mastery or abandon, actually increases, if you please, her own natural timidity about the whole affair, and even carries it one stage further until it is brought perilously near to disgust and moral indignation.