The positive woman who is disloyal to her absent husband is not disloyal from weakness, she is disloyal owing to the vital impulse of her large and important reproductive organs, which, after a spell of idleness, clamorously demand employment. The woman who lies about her age, or about her antecedents, or about any other circumstance of her life, in order to secure a husband or a lover, does not do so because she is relatively weaker than the man she wishes to secure, but because, again, her unconscious mind urges her to procure fertilization at all costs. The unfairness of the attitude of most psychologists and other men to the phenomenon of unreliability and deception in woman, consists in the fact that they condemn it without understanding it; while those who neither condemn it nor understand it stubbornly, stupidly, and sentimentally deny it in the face of all the overwhelming evidence in proof of its existence. But when once you admit that duplicity and disloyalty in women are part of a vital principle making for the multiplication and preservation of life, and serving the best interests of the species, you are no longer even entitled to condemn those same characteristics when they happen to operate in circumstances and conditions inconvenient to yourself. You cannot always expect to have it both ways, and if the species profits by a certain principle in the female, it must expect to pay for that principle somewhere, somewhen. To attempt to make woman perfectly honest and upright would therefore be to attack the most vital impulse within her[186]—that impulse which causes her to be eager to the point of unscrupulousness in securing and preserving a multiplication of life. And yet there are many wise fools, both men and women, who have solemnly set themselves that object, and are striving to achieve it by every means in their power. If we observe Nature herself engaged upon the same task that constitutes woman’s principal concern in life, we observe the same unscrupulousness. Nature stops at nothing to achieve this end. All means are good to her: rapine, deception, falsehood, usurpation of rights, bullying, stealth, robbery, invasion, and complete indifference to quality and desirability.