We have to believe that unmocked love has existence in the streets,
because of the proof that is published when a man shoots a woman who has
rejected him; and from this also do we learn to believe that a woman of
the burlesque classes is able to reject. But for that sign we should
find little or nothing intelligible in what we see or overhear of the
drama of love in popular life.

In its easy moments, in its leisure, at holiday time, it baffles all
tradition, and shows us the spirit of comedy clowning after a fashion
that is insular and not merely civic. You hear the same twang in country
places; and whether the English maid, having, like the antique, thrown
her apple at her shepherd, run into the thickets of Hampstead Heath or
among sylvan trees, it seems that the most humorous thing to be done by
the swain would be, in the opinion in vogue, to stroll another way.
Insular I have said, because I have not seen the like of this fashion
whether in America or elsewhere in Europe.

But the chief inversion of all, proved summarily by the annual inversion
of the worship of images on the fifth of November, is that of a sentence
of Wordsworth's--"We live by admiration."




DRY AUTUMN


One who has much and often protested against the season of Autumn, her
pathos, her chilly breakfast-time, her "tints," her decay, and her