heart did not criticise his wife, any more than Rosine criticised her
mother, but both of them knew how it was, instinctively, and were
drawn closer by a secret tie. Clerambault was not aware that in his
daughter he had found the real wife of his heart and mind. Nor did he
begin to suspect it, till in these last days the war had seemed to
break the tacit accord between them. Rosine's approval hitherto had
bound her to him, and now all at once it failed him. She knew many
things before he did, but shrank from the depths of the mystery; the
mind need not give warning to the heart, it knows.

Strange, splendid mystery of love between souls, independent of social
and even of natural laws. Few there be that know it, and fewer still
that dare to reveal it; they are afraid of the coarse world and its
summary judgments and can get no farther than the plain meaning
of traditional language. In this conventional tongue, which is
voluntarily inexact for the sake of social simplification, words are
careful not to unveil, by expressing them, the many shades of reality
in its multiple forms. They imprison it, codify it, drill it; they
press it into the service of the mind already domesticated; of that
reasoning power which does not spring from the depth of the
spirit, but from shallow, walled-in pools--like the basins at
Versailles--within the limits of constituted society.

In this somewhat legal phraseology love is bound to sex, age, and
social classes; it is either natural or unnatural, legitimate or the
reverse. But this is a mere trickle of water from the deep springs of
love, which is as the law of gravitation that keeps the stars in their
courses, and cares nothing for the ways that we trace for it. This
infinite love fulfils itself between souls far removed by time and
space; across the centuries it unites the thoughts of the living and