Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/110

94 making several women at the same time partially happy, or in silencing in them the opposition of rivalry, which by no means is equivalent to assent. Woman is guided by the proper feeling that a real marriage relation can exist only between two persons. And if the woman, in accordance with this feeling, resents the proposal to share her lover with other women, she only makes use of her right; and in formulating this right she will ask men this question: Which one of you would be willing to be required to share his beloved with other men?

Whatever a man or a woman possesses of love, confidence, and devotion can be entirely bestowed upon one person. It is impossible to simultaneously love two men or two women truly. A man can have twenty mistresses at the same time, but not two wives. But woman has a right to be a wife, she has a right to demand that everything should be given her which she herself offers, and it is to misunderstand her right, no less than the nature of marriage, when one expects a woman to be content to lie in wait, as it were, with her love, till her lover has made the round among colleagues, and her turn for a visit has come.

Woman does not ask for several men, but one she wishes to possess wholly. Only degenerate women, inured to immorality by education and surroundings, or prompted by an abnormal physical constitution, can entertain relations with several men at the same time, or even follow the