passion that knows not pity is merely a daemonic possession, and should
be taken to the madhouse.

I confess that there is nothing in the world more amazing to me than the
easy brutality with which one hears of some men doing what is called
"breaking off their engagements." Only a new face has to show itself,
and the old face at once disappears with a blow and a wail.

Murder, of course, is one way out of many difficult situations, and the
worst kinds of murder are by no means capital offences. It is true that
all engagements are not made by the same vital bonds as that of Jenny's
and Theophil's, but many are. For a man wilfully to break an engagement
means sometimes that the whole love-life in a woman is atrophied, all
that made her woman stabbed to the quick of life.

Yet no one who knows anything of women can have failed to remark that
women themselves are even more brutal in this matter. Nothing could
exceed the executioner-like promptitude with which a woman will despatch
a man for whom she has ceased to care. But in her case there is to be
urged that, though fundamentally love is of equal importance to man and
woman, it does not so often mean the absolute saving or wrecking of a
man's life as it does a woman's. It is not a disgrace to a man to be
jilted; it is to a woman. For a woman to be jilted is for her to have
failed,--as a woman; and for a woman to have failed as a woman is for
her to value no other success.

All this to maintain, in spite of the reader, that Londonderry is no
milksop because he is not going to jilt--that is, murder--poor little
Jenny, throw up New Zion, and seek his new love on the wild winds. But
the agony of it none the less! O Jenny! Jenny! sweet and true and good