The fact that this feverish humanitarianism and sentimentality are frequently most mischievous in their effects and create a number of national abuses, besides involving the expenditure of large sums of money on what are frequently the least desirable and least promising elements in the nation, is concealed beneath the dramatic munificence of the wealthy spinster’s life.[114] In the wealthy classes, as the result of their superior cultivation, the compensation frequently takes an active intellectual form, and when, owing to the vague consciousness of enduring a great grievance (common to most positive spinsters who have not successfully sublimated their reproductive instincts), misanthropy supervenes, there may arise a very pronounced sex-antagonism, leading the spinsters who have developed it to engage in pursuits, or in intellectual pastimes, where they feel they can clash with men, or where they know they can resist or impede men in the natural business of their lives. Spinsters seeking this kind of compensation frequently derive great satisfaction from misogamist meditations. They will display a morbid interest in arguments against marriage, in the statistics of insanity or disease among married women, and in the evidence of excessive parturition (leading to debility) among the wives of the poor. They will exercise their influence to convert young girls to misanthropy, to misogamy, or at least to an indifference to men; and if they can achieve this end, under a religious cloak (which is not difficult with passionate young girls of eighteen, whose “vague voluminous and powerful feelings, if afforded means to do so, settle down and concentrate on a single object,”[115]), they justify themselves on the score that they have led such young girls into paths of purity and devotion.[116] It would be impracticable here to deal with all the possible manifestations of sex-repression in the female celibate. They have been discussed very fully by other authors, and in detail they would serve no purpose in this book. I have contented myself with hinting broadly at those morbid results of sex-repression in the positive virgin which, while not leading to definite lunacy or insanity, are yet common enough to demand consideration in a discussion upon the spinster’s relation to society; but let not any reader imagine that in the outline given above there has been any desire to dwell upon the black side of a picture which from whatever angle it be viewed cannot at best be a pleasant one. There is a good deal of strong feeling among the majority of people to-day against the belief that sex-repression need necessarily have _bad_ results. These people say that the school of psycho-analysts have grossly exaggerated the facts about the phenomena, and have drawn an unnecessarily lurid description of them. But surely the question is one concerning which it would be suicidal in a scientist to exaggerate or overstate his case. Is it not after all common sense?