Beginnings tell most poignantly, particularly when they consist of first experiences in fundamental matters. And this kind of beginning, if it is not quickly corrected, is almost always fatal. It destroys that trust, that confidence, that humble and willing subservience, which are at once a young woman’s instinct and her joy. It poisons the first hours of her maturity, of her self-realization, of her taste of life’s deeper waters; but, above all, it revives in her precisely those emotions and prejudices which ought to have been stifled for ever—her high-school doubts and qualms regarding the general desirability of her Maker’s scheme for mammalian fertilization. She may forgive this first tragic disenchantment. It is doubtful whether she ever forgets it. And if her husband, as is often the case, continues inept, clumsy and uneasy about the whole relationship, it matters not even if they have children, that disillusionment which, in any case, is bound to come, is unduly expedited, and the union gets prematurely blighted. If there are no children—then there is either open revolt or infidelity, or both. In this way very many eminently desirable women suffer untold hardships through monogamy[59]; and though they are frequently too proud and too dignified to reveal to anyone the smallest hint of their suffering, this may be read in a hundred signs about their homes and their persons. The bitter contempt that many women display towards their husbands, their tendency to contradict, offend and insult them before strangers, and their aptitude to appeal to outsiders rather than to their husbands for advice and help, are all probably the outcome of experiences that have occurred quite early in their married life, all of which were disenchanting, unpleasant, and destructive of confidence. For the healthy, positive young man, in this case, all that can be pleaded is that it is not entirely his fault. In England, as a rule, he is bred in an atmosphere so perfectly sex-tight, that no intelligent or enlightening word ever reaches him on the subject. On the contrary, all is clammy, frightened, guilty silence. On reaching maturity, if he be sensitive, the ordinary means of acquiring practical experience in the matter will probably strike him as too sordid, too commercial, too completely lifted out of the atmosphere of romance and adventure in which his mind has always pictured ideal sexual experiences; and the consequence is that frequently he not only practises abstinence for too long, but also develops inhibitions and fantasies which hardly conduce, when the time comes, to a happy consummation of his first love-match. And yet the world has grown so stupid in regard to all these matters, and foolish romantic women’s voices have become so clamorous, that there is an ever-increasing body of idiots who insist on the desirability of men being virgins when they marry!