§ 101
Indeed, it may be confidently asserted that the accomplishment of this erotic tour de force on the part of the husband (during which he may observe the greatest possible effect that man can have upon woman) gives the husband a sense of exaltation that could not be paralleled, a feeling of power that produces in him a keenness and penetrating sense of satisfaction that he has never before felt. After an experience of this kind, he is fully alive, as he never was before, to the possibilities of erotic ecstasy emanating from the preliminaries and every several and separate phase of the love episode as responded to by his wife.
This entire reconstruction of the love episode not only throws into strong light the value of the preliminary and intermediary phases of the love episode, but it puts, in the husband’s mind, so much value on the first and second acts of the play that the actual occurrence of his own erotic acme has then a much lessened importance.
If he can so transform his wife, as he sees her transformed before his very eyes, and perceives in every sense quality of consciousness, and if he can thus express his love any time he wishes, his former hurried, perfunctory and mechanical sexuality appears to him as a dried leaf as compared to the full-blown rose of his present triumph. He recognizes that he has stepped from one level of existence to a higher plane of life, and that he is human in a new and enlarged sense.