Montaigne, Essais, Bk. iii, Ch. V. It is a significant fact that, even in the matter of information, women, notwithstanding much ignorance and inexperience, are often better equipped for marriage than men. As Fürbringer remarks (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 212), although the wife is usually more chaste at marriage than the husband, yet "she is generally the better informed partner in matters pertaining to the married state, in spite of occasional astonishing confessions."
"She never loses her self-respect nor my respect for her," a man writes in a letter, "simply because we are desperately in love with one another, and everything we do—some of which the lowest prostitute might refuse to do—seems but one attempt after another to translate our passion into action. I never realized before, not that to the pure all things are pure, indeed, but that to the lover nothing is indecent. Yes, I have always felt it, to love her is a liberal education." It is obviously only the existence of such an attitude as this that can enable a pure woman to be passionate.
"To be really understood," as Rafford Pyke well says, "to say what she likes, to utter her innermost thoughts in her own way, to cast aside the traditional conventions that gall her and repress her, to have someone near her with whom she can be quite frank, and yet to know that not a syllable of what she says will be misinterpreted or mistaken, but rather felt just as she feels it all—how wonderfully sweet is this to every woman, and how few men are there who can give it to her!"