It may be a fallacious index, for
muscular strength is not necessarily correlated with sexual vigor, and in
its extreme degrees appears to be more correlated with its absence. But it
furnishes, in Stendhal's phrase, a probability of passion, and in any case
it still remains a symbol which cannot be without its effect. We must not,
of course, suppose that these considerations are always or often present
to the consciousness of the maiden who "blushingly turns from Adonis to
Hercules," but the emotional attitude is rooted in more or less unerring
instincts. In this way it happens that even in the field of visual
attraction sexual selection influences women on the underlying basis of
the more primitive sense of touch, the fundamentally sexual sense.
Women are very sensitive to the quality of a man's touch, and
appear to seek and enjoy contact and pressure to a greater extent
than do men, although in early adolescence this impulse seems to
be marked in both sexes. "There is something strangely winning to
most women," remarks George Eliot, in _The Mill on the Floss_,
"in that offer of the firm arm; the help is not wanted physically
at that moment, but the sense of help--the presence of strength
that is outside them and yet theirs--meets a continual want of
the imagination.
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