(to face page 32)
Chart II.
Curve showing the depressing effects on the "wave-crests" of fatigue and over-work. Crest a represented only by a feeble and transient up-welling. Shortly before and during the time of the crest d Alpine air restored the vitality of the subject. The increased vitality is shown by the height and number of the apices of this wave-crest.
(to face page 33)
The effects of fatigue, city life, bad feeding, and, indeed, of most outward circumstances may be very marked, and may for years, or all her life, so reduce her vitality that a woman may never have experienced any spontaneous sex-impulse at all.
The effects of fatigue, which reduces the vital energy, even in a normal, strongly sexed woman, can be seen in the second curve opposite, where at a the intermediate wave-crest is very much reduced. This is not a generalised chart, but a detailed record of an actual individual case.
Curves similar to those shown facing page [32] represent in general terms a simplified view of what my research leads me to believe to be the normal, spontaneous sex tide in women of our race. As one young married woman confided to me, her longing for bodily union with her husband, as distinct from her longing for his daily companionship, seemed to well up naturally like "clockwork," and this during his long absence. But human beings vary remarkably in every particular, and just as no two people have the same features, so no two people would have absolutely identical curves were they recorded in sufficient detail. Many a woman is particularly conscious of only one sex-impulse in each moon-month. Of such women, some feel the period which comes before menstruation, and some feel the one which follows it. In those who generally feel only one, the second period is sometimes felt when they are particularly well, or only when they read exciting novels, or meet the man they love at a time coinciding with the natural, but suppressed, time of desire. There are a few women, who seem to be really a little abnormal, who feel the strongest desire actually during the menstrual flow.
If anyone who reads this thinks to test my view by questioning a number of women, the result will probably appear very conflicting, partly because it is not often that women will tell the truth about such a thing, and partly because in the larger number of women either one or the other period is the more acute and is the one they observe in themselves—if they have observed anything. But a delicate and more accurate investigation of such cases will often bring to light the existence of the second crest of vitality. Once the fundamental idea is grasped, much that appeared obscure or of no significance becomes plain and full of meaning. One lady doctor with whom I discussed my view at once said that it illuminated many observations she had made on her patients, but had not brought together or explained.
There is but little evidence to be found in scientific works on sex, but an interesting instance is mentioned by Forel ("The Sexual Question," Engl. Transl. page 92) in another connection. He says: "A married woman confessed to me, when I reproached her for being unfaithful to her husband, that she desired coitus at least once a fortnight, and that when her husband was not there she took the first comer." Forel did not see any law in this. We may perhaps all see in her want of self-control a grievous moral abnormality, but in her fortnightly periods of desire she fits perfectly into the physiological law which, it appears to me, governs the normal sex tides of our race.