By immorality I do not mean that limited, foolishly narrow-minded notion of the Puritans, which confines itself to the condemnation of all sexual pleasure. The Puritans themselves were immoral in my sense; because, they were hostile to life. St. Paul himself was immoral, in my sense; because, being a celibate, and as good as a monk himself, he said to the Corinthians: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman,...[24] For I would that all men were even as I myself[25].... I say, therefore, to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I.”[26] St. Paul was indeed very immoral in my sense; because when he cast about him for a reason to justify the holy and sacred union of matrimony, the only one he could find was that it alleviated a man’s lust.[27] I mean by immorality, as I have already explained, all those crimes of omission and commission that are hostile to the best kind of life. Social life cannot continue unless it is well ordered. Disordered social life is in danger of annihilation: therefore all those crimes that lead to social disorder as the result of man’s declining social instinct are, in my sense, immoral. In Chapter III I showed how predominant the reproductive instinct must of necessity be in Woman; but I also showed that, owing to her mind’s constant misinterpretation of bodily messages, it does not follow that Woman will always be _thinking_ of sex, man and the child, simply because her body thinks and works round nothing else. The Positive Woman—the young fully formed girl—is all sex; her body aspires and yearns for nothing more ardently than the fulfilment of her destiny; this cannot help being so, and yet what from all appearances could be more remote, more different from thoughts of sexual relations and reproduction than the mental preoccupations of the healthy decent young girl? She could not tell you why she is fond of men’s society. She knows only that she is fond of it. She could not explain why she hopes to marry ultimately; she knows her father and mother were married and that most adults seem to marry, but she has not the faintest conception of all that this implies. She notices that she has a marked taste in men—that some men are like wooden images to her, and that others thrill her through and through; but she is not aware of the reasons of all this. While, however, the very mystery of these thrills, the very impenetrability of her likes and dislikes in regard to men, make her abandon any hope of knowing the why and the wherefore of these experiences, she is not unfavourably disposed towards them. On the contrary they interest her and attract her as if magnetically; while men are the object of her most solemn and most undivided attention. Occasionally she has a terrible, unutterable dream, the very recollection of which shocks her for days afterwards; but these adventures she has in slumber throw no fresh light on her problem for