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man into a posture of well-oiled acceptance. The philosopher, logician, and artist often felt and sometimes expressed the fundamental resemblance between men and women, but these particular men were as much a product of centuries of emotional self-hypnosis as were the men who lacked their accompanying vision. They could not overcome their daily need for sexual variety and imaginative sexual pursuit, and. at best they could only attain a complete sexual repression which was, in itself, merely an artificial retreat and not a repudiation.
Women were also forced to flee from the monotone of matter-of-fact sexual yielding. By singling out one man and meeting him with an ecstasy of prostration, they made him an all-conquering god whose lustre they indirectly shared. Average women, because of their physical limitations, lacked the ability to imitate the force with which men guarded their delusion, and were compelled to adopt more indirect and insidious methods, such as jealousies, coquetries, retreats, cruelties, and slavish attitudes. These produced an inner turmoil which fanned the ardency of the man's pursuit and prevented his godship from listlessly and nakedly revealing how much it resembled the plain, sexual depths of the woman. If the man did sink to this dully naked acceptance, in spite of the woman's devices, another man was always conveniently at hand to fill the pause in the drama. Average women did not contain an imaginative restlessness which would have forced them to doubt the shining superiority of one idol and seek a fresh image. Their dull eyes found no fault with the figure made by their need and abandoned it only because of the departure or indifference of the man himself. But exceptional women were often led from one man to another because of their discontented imaginations. After their imaginations had divested one man of his golden garments, it would have permanently spoiled the pretending drama if the woman had not singled out another man for determined worship and compelled her imagination to reiterate its destructive efforts. In the case of a man and woman who possessed equally fervent imaginations, Greek met Greek, and the delusion of each one was permanently protected and exhilarated!
Among exceptional men, where the man's intellectual directness forced him to admit to himself the one-coloured resemblance between himself and the woman, if the woman could and did join in his active recognition, their sexual relations resolved into a matter-of-