“I'll try,” he began soberly. “If I were a poet, naturally I would use different language. As I'm only a prosaic doctor and physiologist I may shock your ideals a little.”
“No matter,” she interrupted. “They couldn't well get a harder jolt than they have had already.”
He nodded and went on:
“There are two elemental human forces that maintain life—hunger and love. They are both utterly simple, otherwise they could not be universal. Hunger compels the race to live. Love compels it to reproduce itself. There has never been anything mysterious about either of these forces and there never will be—except in the imagination of sentimentalists.
“Nature begins with hunger. For about thirteen years she first applies this force to the development of the body before she begins to lay the foundation of the second. Until this second development is complete the passion known as love cannot be experienced.
“What is this second development? Very simple again. At the base of the brain of every child there is a vacant space during the first twelve or fifteen years. During the age of twelve to fourteen in girls, thirteen to fifteen in boys, this vacant space is slowly filled by a new lobe of the brain and with its growth comes the consciousness of sex and the development of sex powers.
“This new nerve center becomes on maturity a powerful physical magnet. The moment this magnet comes into contact with an organization which answers its needs, as certain kinds of food answer the needs of hunger, violent desire is excited. If both these magnets should be equally powerful, the disturbance to both will be great. The longer the personal association is continued the more violent becomes this disturbance, until in highly sensitive natures it develops into an obsession which obscures reason and crushes the will.
“The meaning of this impulse is again very simple—the unconscious desire of the male to be a father, of the female to become a mother.”
“And there is but one man on earth who could thus affect me?” Mary asked excitedly.
“Rubbish! There are thousands.”