consideration. The community could never permit the practice, for
it strikes at the very root of their whole social system.

The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of the
omission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with
us, spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the
warp of man's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect
of the loss upon the individuality of the person himself is what
concerns us now.

If there is one moment in a man's life when his interest for the
world at large pales before the engrossing character of his own
emotions, it is assuredly when that man first falls in love.
Then, if never before, the world within excludes the world without.
For of all our human passions none is so isolating as the tenderest.
To shut that one other being in, we must of necessity shut all the
rest of mankind out; and we do so with a reckless trust in our own
self-sufficiency which has about it a touch of the sublime.
The other millions are as though they were not, and we two are alone
in the earth, which suddenly seems to have grown unprecedentedly
beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judicious depopulation to
make of any spot an Eden. Perhaps the early Jewish myth-makers had
some such thought in mind when they wrote their idyl of the cosmogony.
The human traits are true to-day. Then at last our souls throw
aside their conventional wrappings to stand revealed as they really
are. Certain of comprehension, the thoughts we have never dared
breathe to any one before, find a tongue for her who seems
fore-destined to understand. The long-closed floodgates of feeling
are thrown wide, and our personality, pent up from the time of its
inception for very mistrust, sweeps forth in one uncontrollable