many people mistake the symptoms, and only discover when it is too late
that they have never really had the true experience. Hence the overtime in
the Divorce Court. Hence, too, the importance of "calf love," which serves
as a sort of apprenticeship to the mystery, and enables you to discriminate
between the substance and the shadow.

And in "calf love" I do not include the adumbrations of extreme childhood
like those immortalised in _Annabel Lee_:--

I was a child and she was a child
In that kingdom by the sea.

* * * * *

But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee.

I know that love. I had it when I was eight. "She" was also eight, and she
had just come from India. She was frightfully plain, but then--well, she
had come from India. She had all the romance of India's coral strand about
her, and it was India's coral strand that I was in love with. Moreover, she
was a soldier's daughter, and to be a soldier's daughter was, next to being
a soldier, the noblest thing in the world. For that was about the time
when, under the inspiration of _The Story of the Hundred Days_, I had set
out with a bag containing a nightshirt and a toothbrush to enlist in the
Black Watch. (It was a forlorn adventure that went no further than the
railway station.) Finally she had given me, as a token of her love, _Poor
Little Gaspard's Drum_, wherein I read of Napoleon and the Egyptian desert,
and, above all, of the Mamelukes. How that word thrilled me! "The
Mamelukes!" What could one do but fall in love with a girl who used such