Page:The Way of a Virgin.djvu/141

Rh does not follow now that, by reason of her greater reserve, she lacks these emotions.

History has shown us psychologists and investigators in plenty, but they were not the psychologists of to-day, recording the results of their investigations with meticulous care and detail. The sexually frigid woman, we can confidently assume, was by no means unknown to the ancients. She was, however, unusual, abnormal; and if a sexually frigid woman be accounted abnormal, it is not hard to see why a normal is deemed erotic.

In these times, when it is the fashion to dissect everyone and everything, we are prone to argue from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the peculiar to the general; sexual frigidity in woman, at first an anomaly, ends in being a trait; the exception becomes, does not prove, the rule.

Needless to say, a great psychologist like Havelock Ellis has a wealth of information to offer on the subject, and we commend our readers to his masterly handling of it. He has something to say on every aspect of the question, from the case of the woman who is cold almost to the point of sexelessness to that of the erotic wife who 'becomes frenzied with excitement during intercourse and insensible to everything but the pleasure of it.' In conclusion, he adjusts the scales with exquisite and scientific precision, holding that 'the distribution of the sexual impulse between the two sexes is fairly balanced.'

Earlier on, however, he makes a point which we shall do well to bear in mind. '……Sexual impulse is by no means so weak in women as many would lead us to think. It would appear that, whereas in earlier ages there was generally a