In Paraguay, where laxity of customs prevails, a most impatient young man, who had reasons to believe himself loved, would repeat in every key, from the most tender to the most impassioned, with sobbing voice and tyrannical accent, this one word: "Today!" And the beautiful Creole, who knew nothing of Darwin and sexual selection, would reply smilingly: "But why today? You have known me for ten days only; in two months, perhaps." In this artless reply that Paraguayan girl was evolving the philosophy of seduction and coquetry, the fundamental lines of the physiology of the sexes.
Every day the most beautiful half of the human race throws in our faces the rude accusation that we are much less exacting in our tastes, and that, satisfied with the external forms, we rarely seek to determine the substance. And it is natural that it should happen this way; the different missions assigned to each of the two sexes in the amorous strategy require that this should be done. If certain contours exercise so great and immediate a sway over us, it is because we seek in them, unwittingly and involuntarily, the good mother and the good nurse; and, more than it seems, voluptuousness prepares the future generations for the good and the better. To fructify a human female, who shall become a good mother and a good nurse, the flash of a desire and the instantaneous ardor of a battle will suffice; but woman does not seek a fecundator only; she wants her companion to be the defender of her future children, the protector of her weakness; she wants to assure herself as to the deep energy of the passion of him who says he loves her; she wants to sound the abysses of heart and mind. The man shall build the nest: is he an architect? He shall defend it from rapacious animals: is he courageous? He shall train and enrich his children: has he talent, ambition, tenacity of purpose? He must know all this. For some time she has been aware that she is young and beautiful; many a time the ardent rays of a thousand desires have showered upon her; at her command numerous adorers would fall at her feet, all young, perhaps, handsome and robust; but she does not want a man; she wants the man who will be lastingly, powerfully and ardently hers. This is how, in the initial web of love, we read the inexorable laws which govern it; how clearly nature explains to us the inevitable fickleness of human males, their polygamic wanderings and their unreasonable requirements; just as modesty, chastity and the sublime reticence of woman are the faithful guardians of the destinies of the future family. Much of this elementary strategy was lost in the stormy vicissitudes of modern civilization; it is necessary to scrape off much varnish and snatch away many rags in order to touch the robust members of the primitive passions; nevertheless, through multiform hypocrisy, we succeed in finding the kernel of the thing.