How often in the history of our race have not a chaste and positive couple, kept apart by unfavourable circumstances and in the midst of appalling difficulties, whispered to each other passionately: “One long embrace from you and I should be content to die!” This shows that the self-preservative instinct is as good as dead in such cases. Dead in the woman, because when her reproductive instinct is “meaning business,” nothing else can live beside it; and dead in the man, because (1) he knows that love and his girl expect him to be determined and unrelenting in his worship and his desire, and (2) because his very positiveness itself makes him set the multiplication of Life higher than his own existence for the time being. Moreover, when the girl and the man insist upon an attitude of complete and unreserved “unselfishness” in each other, they are simply betraying the fact that they expect the self-preservative instinct in each other to be for the time being in a state of suspended animation. This is a proof of what they understand by love. As a matter of fact, it is a proof only of the circumstance that the reproductive instinct is expected for the moment to become all-powerful or to suppress every other feeling. When this state is reached, if the girl has no vigilant protector or guardian, and the man is not strongly endowed with social instinct, the result is usually and inevitably seduction, particularly if the man shows some mastery in sex, and some understanding of it too. And, indeed, when one considers the forces that are active here; when, moreover, one considers the temptations that are elevated here to the _nth_ power, the wonder is not that seduction occasionally occurs among positive couples, but that it does not always occur, that it is not the rule. Only man’s social instinct can prevent it. Only man’s social instinct remains, and is strong enough to prevent it. Do not, however, let us confound the social instinct of the positive man, which is strong enough to stand up to his reproductive instinct, to control it, and to make it wait and consider responsibilities, with the so-called “self-control” of the negative young man, who could love his negative girl for half a century without ever desiring more than to squeeze her pale thin hand, while she feels exactly the same about him.[36] Of course, in countries like France, where positiveness on both sides is at such a high pitch of intensity that it actually fills the atmosphere of every room and makes every mixed company electric, and also where the social instinct of men is declining more and more every year, the only possible check on wholesale seductions is a vigilant and inexorable protector or guardian, who watches over the _jeune fille de famille_, until she is married, and does so with such unabating zeal that it can truly be said that a respectable French girl is _always being watched_.