to a man, but even repulsive to him when he is aware of it: while the male characteristics in themselves are sufficient to please the female, man has to denude woman of hers before he can love her.
But the match-making instinct exerts a much deeper and more important influence on the nature of woman than can be gathered from the little I have said on this subject. I wish now to draw attention to woman's attitude at a play: she is always waiting to see if the hero and heroine, the lovers in the piece, will quarrel. This is nothing but matchmaking, and psychologically does not differ a hair from it: it is the ever present desire to see the man and woman united. But that is not all; the tremendous excitement with which women await the crucial point in a decent or indecent book is due to nothing less than the desire to see the sexual union of the principal characters, and is coupled with an actual excitation at the thought, and positive appreciation of the force which is behind sexual union. It is not possible to state this formally and logically, the only thing is to try and understand how it is that the two things are psychologically one with women. The mother's excitement on her daughter's wedding-day is of the same quality as that engendered by reading a story by Prevost, or Sudermann's "Katzensteg." It is quite true that men are very interested by novels which end in sexual union, but in quite a different way from women; they thoroughly appreciate the sexual act in imagination, but they do not follow the gradual approach of the two people concerned from the very beginning; and their interest does not grow, as woman's does, in constant proportion to the reciprocal value which the two people have for one another.
The breathless pleasure with which the various obstacles are overcome, the feeling of disappointment at each thwarting of the sexual purpose, is altogether womanish and unmanly; but it is always present with woman. She is continually on the watch for sexual developments, whether in real life or in literature. Has no one ever wondered why women are so keen and " disinterested " about bringing
