Chivalry and Prostitution are incompatible.
It must be confessed, however, that deterioration of the woman-organisation and temperament conduces greatly to masculine promiscuity. Not only because this entails loss of power to charm and bind the mate, but because with the sex-immaturity, on the one hand of the over-Feminised type, on the other, of the Mannish woman, women lose, in greater or less degree, the natural power of one sex to assuage passion in the other.
Man is deteriorated, moreover, by moral and psychical deterioration in that sex whence moral impulse springs, because, in such case, the appeal of woman ceases to be, as is normal, to the emotional and chivalrous in him, but evokes, on the contrary, biological instinct mainly, or merely.
It is well-established truth that her first lover (or her husband, supposing she had loved him) retains a unique hold upon a woman's mind throughout her after-life—his personality or memory dominating her imagination as no later-comer is able to do. This is because that first enters into possession of both Consciousness and Subconsciousness while the tablets of these are still virgin and unblotted. This first impresses himself, therefore, clearly and strongly defined upon her exquisitely-sensitised tablets of remembrance.
Latter-day young girls, permitted the injurious licence of free and unchaperoned association with the other sex, even when they come to marriage, inviolate, have, many of them, passed through experiences which so have blurred and sullied their young highly-impressionable temperament and senses as to have despoiled these of that fair purity and freshness indispensable alike to potent impressions and to deep attachments. In natural woman who has arrived at womanhood without premature arousing of the senses, soul and sense are at fine poise, and respond in vital unison to love. In girls whose innocence and conduct have not been duly safeguarded, the prematurely-excited senses have become detached from the soul—from the higher emotions, that is. With the result that this fine poise of mind and body, which is the Hall-mark of Woman-development, and whence romantic passion issues, has been irretrievably lost.
The same is true, in degree, of young men. They too deteriorate when biological instinct is dissociated in them from the higher impulses of passion. But in men, the poise, being less delicate, is not only less readily lost, but it is more readily recovered. In this, as in other things, the normal male makes for means; while woman's bent is toward extremes. Further, physical passion being normally far stronger in him, and initiative in impulse—whereas in her it is mainly responsive—the senses assert sway over him spontaneously. While in natural girls these lie more or less dormant, unless artificially roused, or until aroused in natural response to love.
Early philanderings (more serious than boy-and-girl comradeship and innocent flirtation) prevent women not only from ever attaining their highest levels of organisation and temperament, but they destroy effectually their power to love profoundly and whole-heartedly. They rob them, accordingly, of the greatest transfiguring potence and happiness of life.
III
Odious and startling evidence that because of woman's vital emotionalism and sensitive psychology, her nature retains ineffaceable vestiges of all that has happened to her, is the fact that a woman's children by a second husband may resemble her first husband far more than they resemble their father. A significant and repulsive adulteration of type, and one so intrinsic that a woman who had been previously wife to a negro or a Chinaman will present her second husband, typically European, with offspring of negroid or of Mongolian type. That husbands and wives come to resemble one another in physiognomy and characteristics, is further indication of the subtle and potent temperamental fusion and implications of the mysterious sex-union.