The physical equipment for marriage, and the traditional impetus derived from the ancestral habits of her sex, are both present in her, but their urge is faint, the inner voice, far from being loud and insistent, is barely audible, and she is harassed by little of that importunacy on the part of her reproductive organs which compels her sister either to adapt herself normally to life, or else to seek compensations and to develop acute nervous symptoms in so doing. Her own and her friends’ failure to recognize the true nature of her condition, however, frequently, if not invariably, leads to misinterpretations of her precise value as an individual which are as gross as they are dangerous—_gross_ because they apply moral values to a condition that is primarily physical, _dangerous_ because they lead the rest of the world into a misunderstanding concerning the importance of a normal sexual life to the individual, and the worth of life generally. These misinterpretations, particularly in England and America, usually take one or all of the following forms: (1) Miss A, the negative spinster in question, may regard herself, and be regarded by others, as _above_ the ordinary impulses of her positive sister, so that she and others may draw a moral from her condition, and argue that, by means of exercising sufficient _self-control_, and preoccupying the mind sufficiently with “elevated” thoughts, the sex-impulse is easily overcome without any dire results whatsoever. (2) Miss A may regard herself, and be regarded by others, as too “pure” for sexual impulses, so that, far from needing to repress or suppress the fleshy “demons” within her, she soars to an altitude too lofty to be reached by them. (3) Miss A may regard herself, and be regarded by others, as _indifferent_ to men, so that she is able to assume an attitude of philosophical detachment towards the main stream of Life, which she contemplates from a distance as a mildly amused and sometimes scoffing spectator. (4) Miss A may convince herself, and convince others, that sex-impulses, because they do not happen to be noticeable in her, are a pure—or rather, an impure illusion. She may argue, and induce others to argue with her, that the power of these impulses is absurdly exaggerated by modern psychology, and that she herself is the best proof of this absurd exaggeration. As I have pointed out, these misinterpretations are gross, and they are also dangerous. They are gross, in the first place, because they take no cognizance of the fact that Miss A is a different creature from her positive sister, an inferior and a less tonic creature, and secondly because they give what is really a lamentable condition a falsely enviable character by concealing its true nature beneath a number of high-falutin’ euphemisms. This procedure is dangerous for the following reasons: