your soul really lurks behind that wonderful likeness of yours, as
I sometimes think it does, but a man cannot have the double power of
making many others feel and of feeling himself. At least, so it seems
to me. Love lightly roused is held as lightly, and one loses one's
respect for even the passion in the abstract. Of what value can a
thing be which springs into life for a trick of manner, an atom or two
more of that negative quality called personal magnetism, while wiser
and better men pass by unnoticed? One naturally asks, What is love?
A spiritual enthusiasm which a cold-blooded analyst would call
sentimentality, or its correlative, a fever of the senses? Neither is
a very exalted set of conditions. I have been through both more
than once, and if my attacks have been light, I have been the better
enabled to study my fair inspiration. I never discovered that she
felt more deeply; simply more strongly, more tempestuously, after the
nature of women. Her feelings were not more complex, they were merely
more strongly accentuated. A woman in love imagines that she is the
pivot on which the world revolves. A general may immortalize himself,
an emperor be assassinated and his empire plunged into a French
Revolution, and her passing interest is not roused; nor is she
unapt to wonder how others can be interested in matters so purely
impersonal. She thinks she loves as no woman ever loved before, and
sometimes she succeeds in making the man think so too. But when a
man has gone through this sort of thing a couple of dozen times, he
becomes impressed with the monotony, the shallowness, and the racial
resemblance, so to speak, of the divine passion; and his own capacity
for indulging in it diminishes in proportion. If Miss Penrhyn is
capable of anything wider and deeper and higher than her average
sister, I have met her too late to be inspired with anything beyond
passing curiosity. In fact, I doubt if I could be capable of so much
as indulging in the surmise had I never known my grandmother. _There_