We will suppose she has been married three or four years, and all this time has been living in perfect concord with her husband. Occasional differences there have been, of course; but they have been unimportant. They have all turned, as is customary in English houses, upon the ridiculous words “selfish” and “unselfish.” When the young wife has wanted her way against her man she has endeavoured to make him yield by giving him a guilty conscience over the matter, and calling his opposition “selfish”; and when at last he has yielded, she has declared both to his face and to the world, that he was the most “unselfish” of husbands.[87] Likewise the man, when he has wanted to exert some leverage upon his wife’s mind, has warned her that resistance on her part would be “selfish,” and upon her yielding has admitted that she was “unselfish.” But apart from these foolish verbal quibbles around the utterly fantastic antithesis “selfish” and “unselfish,” they have had no quarrels. Meanwhile, however, although the husband’s sexual experience has been complete, his wife’s has been of the most fragmentary order. Her reproductive organs and functions, though repeatedly stimulated as if their important business were about to begin, have been robbed each time of the natural sequel to that stimulation. Despite hundreds of alarms and starts, the complete cycle has never been experienced. As a result, this large reproductive equipment has not only remained idle, but in this very idleness has also been cheated again and again of its legitimate expectations, when those expectations seemed most certain of being fulfilled. These repeated rebuffs, together with the continued inactivity of this important mechanism, has not been suffered with impunity. Gradually, as the idleness came to be felt more and more acutely, and the sense of physiological disappointment became insistent, vague messages were sent up through the young wife’s subconsciousness to her brain. These messages we can decipher without any serious inaccuracy as follows:—“We are still idle; we are still inactive. _When_ are we going to function? We ache to function.” It must not be supposed, however, that these messages are deciphered as accurately as this by the woman’s conscious mind. She is vaguely conscious of the importunate calls from her dissatisfied reproductive equipment; but she is aware of them only as _dissatisfaction_. Whence they hail, what they mean, she has not the slightest idea. If you told her that they amounted to protests from her inactive reproductive equipment, she would probably feel so utterly outraged that she would never speak to you or see you again. She would need to be a psychologist herself to interpret them accurately. Now it is when this vague feeling of dissatisfaction first becomes insistent in her conscious mind that she proceeds to act upon it in the manner already described (see p. 196).