When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not
without something of the nature of dismay that the man finds
himself in such changed conditions. He has to deal with
commanding emotions instead of the easy dislikes and
preferences in which he has hitherto passed his days; and he
recognises capabilities for pain and pleasure of which he had
not yet suspected the existence. Falling in love is the one
illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to
think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The
effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons,
neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful,
meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's
eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the
experience of either with no great result. But on this
occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state
in which another person becomes to us the very gist and
centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious
theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with
the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own
person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life
itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world
with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature. And all the
while their acquaintances look on in stupor, and ask each
other, with almost passionate emphasis, what so-and-so can see
in that woman, or such-an-one in that man? I am sure,
gentlemen, I cannot tell you. For my part, I cannot think
what the women mean. It might be very well, if the Apollo
Belvedere should suddenly glow all over into life, and step
forward from the pedestal with that godlike air of his. But
of the misbegotten changelings who call themselves men, and