interest sank--died out, like a candle snuffed in a gale. In that
moment she became afraid.

It is nameless, that terror in the mind of a woman pursued. Yet
without it one of the first of her abstract attractions would be gone.
Undoubtedly it is the joy of the pursuer that the quarry should take
to flight. Would there be any chase without? But long years of study
amongst the more advanced of us have made the fact of rather common
knowledge. The woman has learnt that to be caught there must be flight,
and, in assuming it, she has acquired for herself the instincts of
the pursuer. So an army, resorting to the strategy of retreat, is
still the pursuer in the more subtle sense of the word. It is this
strategy that is cunningly taught in the modern, genteel education
of the sex. The virtue of chastity it is called, but over the length
of time it has come to be a forced growth; it has altered
intrinsically in its composition. Education has learnt to make use
of chastity, rather than to acquire it for itself. And, after all,
what is it in itself, when the gilt of its glamour is stripped, like
tinsel, from the fairy's pantomimic wand?

There is, when everything has been said, only one value in chastity
in its ideal sense, so long as we are tied to these conditions of
human instinct, and that is in the value that it brings to women.
Without it, a woman may be the essence of fascination; she may be
the completeness of attraction, but for the need of the race she is
undesirable. Without chastity, a woman may be most things to a man,
but she cannot be a mother to his child.

Amongst those girls, then, whose desire in life it is to marry,
conforming in all ways to the authority of convention, chastity has