the heels of knowledge and grows out of friendship. I believe they are
fortunate persons to whom things happen in this way. But it may also be
that the mysterious instinct will do its work at a first meeting. Love
at first sight may be quite incomprehensible and unreasonable, but it
is a fact none the less. One meeting may fix the destiny of a man or a
woman, even though the second may not occur for months or even years.

The days that immediately follow this experience may not be happy days.
Many a man has to serve and wait ere he can awaken love in her who is
to him the one woman in the world. Many a woman has to wait and wonder
and face distress. Then, too, till the stage of mutual acknowledgment
is reached love makes men and women awkward. They do uncouth, crude,
and clumsy things. They get into muddles. They make mistakes. It would
seem that some delicate process of mutual adjustment is often necessary
before two souls can really find each other, and while the stumbling
preliminary days last, love is often a torture as well as a delight.
Nor are the best lovers the most successful at first. A superficial
emotion may be easily handled, but a deep one will upset a man and make
him strange to himself. And so two people will maneuver and wander and
baffle each other. They will often be sure and then uncertain by turns,
and will wonder whether love does not chiefly mean hopeless
complications.

But when two souls do really discover each other, then at once a new
life begins, so radiant, beautiful, stimulating, and mysterious, that
even the poets have failed to find sufficient words for it. In their
hearts two lovers always know that this is what they were made for--
that this is the very core and essence of human existence. I think they
generally know that they have been ushered into a house of life of
which they are quite unworthy, and that they take their first steps