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The one injunction necessary for the too enthusiastically climbing husband is: There is plenty of time. Sit on this mossy bank. Help your wife over every stone and stick in the path. Tell her of the grandeur of the view. There is no hurry provided you both arrive at the top and she take the final step before you. No aspect of sun, sky, clouds, forest or lake but is absolutely different after every ascent and superlatively, nay ecstatically, sublime. This is not the only chance you will have to climb Chocorua. Mountain climbing, if not too speedy, is good for the heart, and no expedition so fortifies one for work among the world of men as this pedestrian ascent into the sky. Only you should go together and be together all the time. The men who leave their wives on the piazzas of the hotels in the valley are purely autoerotic boys. No man can tell in words this mountain-climbing experience.
There may be women who think this mountain climbing immoral, coarse, too rough for their fine constitution. These will have to be tenderly lifted up each step of the way but when once at the top will be enthusiastic converts, for they will have in the panorama an experience they will then recognize as totally different and distinctively human.
“It has always been common to discuss the psychology of women. The psychology of men has usually been passed over, whether because it is too simple or too complicated. But the marriage question today is much less the wife problem than the husband problem.”—Havelock Ellis: Little Essays of Love and Virtue, New York, 1922, p. 75.