at kissing, intending to stop there, are playing with a fire that easily becomes uncontrolable. Iwan Bloch, in The Sexual Life of Our Time, says that there is a quantitative difference only, and not a qualitative difference, between the chaste stroking of the hair and the first timid kiss, on the one hand, and the ultimate love rapture. Someone has said that the first intentional touching of the skin of the beloved one is a mating half achieved. The Perfumed Garden ends its description of loving:
Leaves the heart cold and unsatisfied
If the rapture of the kiss is wanting.
Goethe describes the ultimate kiss thus:
Each is conscious only of the other.
His final word is that it is a true saying that the woman who permits a man to kiss her will ultimately grant him complete possession. Indeed, a sensitive woman values her kiss as highly as the last favor. Unless a kiss be exchanged merely as a test of mutual attraction, it is well to recall that chastity was accurately described by Lester Ward as selection, and not abstinence: and to select with great care those whom you admit to the gate of kissing, which is almost invariably, with men and women of any maturity, the last locked gate upon the way to the earthly Eden.
