In what way do they differ?  The male, I think, is more liable to sudden gusts of passion, of violence so great as to be almost uncontrollable—­at least so nearly so as to make it both cruel and stupid to arouse them.  A woman’s nature is not (generally) so quickly stirred.  She takes longer to move (hence the universal fact of courtship).  Or rather it might be more accurate to say that he and she may both start at the same time from the same point, but she takes longer to reach the end, and because this is so, is more capable of stopping before the end is reached.  This she does not understand, and expects that if she can pause, so can he; while he also misunderstands, and does not know that there is for her, just as much as for him, a moment when self-control becomes impossible.

I have said so much about the lack of chivalry shown by women to men that it is only reasonable to point out that the reverse is true, and that men are often extraordinarily unchivalrous towards women.  The cause is, of course, the same:  they do not realize what a strain they are putting on them.  There is still a very general assumption, even by those who really know better, that women have no passions and are untempted from within.  I have often been assured by “men of the world” that “a woman can always stop a man if she wants to.”  No doubt she can—­some men.  She can “stop them if she wants to.”  The trouble is that a time comes when she cannot want to.  The bland assumption that a man has a perfect right to play on a woman’s sex-instincts till they are beyond control, and then call her the guilty one because they are beyond control, is based on the age-old determination not to recognize the full humanity of women.  They are “different” from men.  So they are.  I have admitted it.  But the likeness is much greater than the difference.  And neither the likeness nor the difference makes self-control an easy thing for her.  It is easier up to a certain point, because she is more slowly moved; it is harder when that point is reached because her whole nature is involved.  She has never learnt to say that she can give her body to one while remaining spiritually faithful to another, and perhaps she never will learn.  I at least suspect so.  She may be as fickle as a man, but it will be in a different way.

Of course, in all this I generalize very rashly from a very narrow experience.  My excuse is that these things must be discussed if we are ever to generalize more safely, or to learn that we must not generalize at all.  And I have come to the conclusion that it is perhaps as possible to know something of what is or is not true when one is unmarried as when one is married.  At least one escapes the snare into which so many married people surprisingly fall, of generalizing from an experience which is not merely as narrow as everyone’s must be, but actually unique; which enables them to pronounce with stupefying confidence that all men are as this man is; all women