With a finishing toe-touch to his whiskers, he amicably trotted up to me and—yes!—actually rubbed against my new trousers! What could have happened to him! Had his run through the tunnel turned him out virtuous? And how could he possibly have got here? Experience has shown that a leopard can change his spots, and a negro can grow spotted; but could a diabolical cat become even as a sucking dove and fly over twelve miles all in the space of twenty minutes? Impossible! So I put on a pair of folder-glasses and scrutinised this new arrival doubtingly. No; it was not Beauty—not nearly ugly enough. It was a twin, but larger, blacker, sleeker, a million times more amiable, and very much fatter. Ah!—ha, ha!—hurrah!—happy thought! Why not? I would. And, thereupon, I instantly did it.

Placing the basket gently on the ground, I opened the lid and put in the cold chicken, when lo! in jumped the amiable twin. Half an hour later that basket, that heaven-descended twin, and that successful chicken, were safely deposited in custody of the cat-show steward, with the errant Beauty's entry ticket affixed. If the steward had never seen the real original he would never discover the difference; and if he did happen to be acquainted with the genuine article he could but think that the beast was surprisingly improved, and might even award it first prize for having turned over such a notable new leaf. And for the same reason, my aunt ought to be highly delighted at her favourite's favourable transformation. My heart was lightened of its oppressive troubles, as my hands were free from their feline load. With a hearty appetite I ate an excellent dinner at the hotel, went to the theatre, and turned into bed thankful for all fortune's favours.



During the two following days, carefully steering clear of the cat-show, I enjoyed my freedom gaily, and had—what our three-thousand-miles- removed cousins would call—real good time. On the third morning a letter arrived from my aunt, with an enclosure which for the first moment I took to be a big cheque—a grateful offering, as I hoped, for services skilfully performed. However, it proved to be merely a second letter, in writing that was strange to me, and which with some curiosity I proceeded to peruse. As I unfolded the sheet, a vision suddenly crossed my mind of that savage beast Beauty; a chilly shiver shot through my marrow, and I sent the waiter for soda and brandy. It was an awful thought of what that unkillable cat might do! There he was, rampaging over a civilised country populated with children and lambs, and other unprotected innocents, half mad, perhaps, with hunger, where neither canaries nor pigeons, rabbits or cold chicken were grabbable. What desperate murders he might commit! And should I be held responsible? Here the timely arrival of the waiter helped to raise my spirits by a strong dose of B. and S., and I began the enclosed letter.



It was headed from the cat-show secretary's office. Why, of course, that charming twin had got first prize, no doubt. Let us see. "Dear Madam," so ran the official note, "I beg to call your attention to what I imagine must, in some way, have been an oversight. Your cat, described on the entrance form as 'a black male, named Beauty,' which was, on the evening of its arrival, placed in the class pertaining to the descriptive form, was found this morning to have presented us with four remarkably fine kittens. This, of course, necessitated the family's removal from the male cat class. I have much pleasure in being able to inform you that both mother and kittens are in the best of health, and will be carefully attended upon. If you will kindly forward your instructions respecting their disposal, I shall be greatly obliged." That was the note, and wildly did the letters dance before my eyes.



Having saved myself from fainting by finishing the B. and S., I sat for some minutes gasping for breath. Then I rubbed my eyes and reread that awful epistle. Yes—it was so—in solemn, sober black ink! Beauty's twin had got four fine kittens! Great Jehoshaphat! How could I ever get over those confounded kittens! It was too late to murder them. And my aunt—but stop! Let me read her letter; it might suggest something—some feline legerdemain method of conjuring four fine kittens into a first prize black male cat. So here goes. And this is how it went: "I always considered you to be a fool, Samuel, but nothing worse, until now. Unless the enclosed letter is immediately fully explained, and the matter set right, I shall plainly let you know what I do think of you now, and act accordingly. See the secretary, and telegraph me the result at once." Not much hope in that, worse luck; only a limited respite.



Away I went to the show, saw the secretary—from a safe distance—and immediately telegraphed: "Have seen the secretary. Hard at work setting matters right. Awfully sorry." Then I hired a boat, and went fishing for the rest of the day. In the evening I wired: "Beauty must have got changed. Cats now all going home. Found clue and am following up. All right shortly." But my aunt's patience had expired. Next morning came a curt note saying she would at once join me, and either rescue Beauty or settle that secretary. How could I ever face those searching spectacles! I fled. From a lonely spot on the wilds of Dartmoor I wired: "Am following clue sharp. Getting close up. Good news next time." Back came an answer: "Shall be with you to-morrow at noon." At noon next day, I boarded the mail packet Tongariro, bound from Plymouth to New Zealand.



* * * * *



PEOPLE I HAVE NEVER MET

BY SCOTT RANKIN.

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.



"You can do nothing by despising the past and its products; you also can do nothing by being too much afraid of them.... Be content to be a new 'sect,' 'conventicle,' or what not, so long as you feel that you are something, with a life and purpose of its own, in this tangle of a world."—Robert Elsmere.

* * * * *



THE IDLERS CLUB

Is Love a Practical Reality or a Pleasing Fiction?

[Sidenote: Mrs. Lynn Linton thinks there is no doubt as to Love's reality.]

Of the desperate reality of the passion there is no doubt; of the intrinsic value of the thing beloved there may be many. The passion for which men and women have died stands like a tower four-square to all the winds of heaven; but how far that tower has been self-created by fancy, and how much is objectively real, who is the wise man that can determine? What is Love? We know nothing of its source. Sense and sex cannot wholly explain its mystery, else would there be no friendship left among us; and elective affinity is but a dainty carving on the chancel stalls. The loveliness which makes that special person the veritable Rose of the World to us exists but in our imagination. It is no rose that we adore—only at the best a bedeguar, of which the origin is a disagreeable little insect. We believe in the exquisite harmony of those atoms which have arranged themselves to form the thing we love. And we marry our human ideal, expecting the unbroken continuance of that harmony. But the discord comes; colours clash; the jarring note spoils the chord; the idol once accepted as of gold and precious stones, proves to be only common clay, thinly gilt. The diamonds are paste; the pearls are beads of glass filled with shining fishes' scales; and the love which we thought would be a practical reality for life, is nothing but a pleasing fiction, good for its day, and now dead and done with. The lover sees nothing as it is. Life is distorted between jealousy and admiration, and the plain teaching of common-sense is as little understood as the conditions of the fourth dimension or the poetic aspirations of the Simian tongue. The adored is not a real person; the happiness anticipated is not practical nor practicable. Both are on all-fours with the substantiality of a cloud and the serviceable roadway of a rainbow. Custom, familiarity, daily habits are the sole tests by which the reality of the thing beloved can be tried—the reality of the thing beloved and consequent validity of love. Before these tests are applied, the whole affair is as a fairy dream born of the perfume and the mystery of night. With the clear cold breath of morning the dream vanishes, but—what is left? The sigh of the vanishing god?—a tear on the cheek of Psyche?—the loathing of the man who finds Melusine a serpent rather than a woman?—or the peaceful joy of the child who dreams of angels and wakes in its mother's arms?—of those who sleeping on the ocean wake to find themselves safe in port?

* * * * *

[Sidenote: "Rita" thinks Love is beautiful and wise.]

At one period of life, love is simply an emotion—the outcome of attraction, or the effect of that vague mystery which surrounds sex. In this emotional stage the feeling may be real enough, but the passion is an illusion. A girl is often more in love with Love than with an actual lover. The youth who beholds his ideal in the First Woman is in love with the woman herself who for the time (usually very brief) embodies that ideal. But to the girl and the youth comes an hour when they are humiliatingly conscious of study wasted on a prettily-bound work of fiction that for all use and purpose in life is quite valueless. The edifice of romance is constructed much on the same plan as a child's castle of cards, and deservedly shares the same fate. That is to say, the topmost card overbalances the whole structure. It is usually the hand of Reason that topples over Love's romantic tenement by crowning it with the card of Common Sense. When we find Love has become a practical reality, the discovery is often very unpleasant. We would rather not be unhappy if we had the choice. Unfortunately, we haven't, and find ourselves in that condition without exactly knowing how we drifted into it. Drifters often discover Love to be a very practical reality, because of unpleasant consequences. It is decidedly humiliating to find ourselves in the toils of a siren the very reverse of our high ideal of the personage who is to have the honour and glory of subjugating us. This is one of Love's amusing little ways of proving that ideals are really not important. The best and safest test of the reality of Love is to ask yourself how much you have suffered on account of it. I don't speak of such trifles as tears, heartaches, sleepless nights, fevers of jealousy and despair, sacrifices, or discomforts, but of real genuine self-torment and mental torture which only this passion is capable of inflicting on its victims. The most sceptical will acknowledge that its powers in this line are only excelled by its apparent animosity. To discover the life that completes and contents our own is not given to many of us poor mortals. Here and there some fortunate individuals have made that discovery—but they are rare—and not given to boasting on the subject; yet though worldly wise folk scoff at love as a myth, I question whether they could name any other passion of the heart which has occupied so important a place in the world's history, which has given life to all that is great and divine in art, or inspired such deeds of heroism, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom. Before its patient strength men have stood mute and wondering, and proud heads have bent in reverence, and stern eyes grown dim. For Love is beautiful, despite faults, and wise, despite follies. It alone of all human emotions can lift our souls heavenwards, and make even life's thorny path a thing of beauty.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: John Strange Winter's opinions.]

Love may be classed under several heads. The first, the great, the unattainable, the one-sided, and the worn-out. They are all real! What can be more real than the perhaps not very practical passion which first makes young hearts ache? What agony it is to her when he dances three times running with that horrid, stuck-up London girl, with her fashionable jargon, her languorous movements, just a turn or two, and then stop for as many minutes! First love is not often last love. He thinks her unreasonable to mind those dances, yet when a great love comes into her life, making her think of him as "just a boy," he suffers all, or nearly all, the pangs of a great passion. Unavailing pain! She has cast the die of her life, and past loves are shadows compared with the absorbing power that now grips her heart like a vice. Much may happen to the great love, but it is very real! A great love may merge into matrimony, and life may run on oiled wheels, and Darby and Joan may pass through the world, loving faithfully, and without digression, to the end. Or something may come between, and the great love may become the unattainable! It will not be the less real for that.

[Sidenote: The Unattainable.]

The unattainable has more in it of pathos than despair. Romance sweetens it, and the romance never dies. The tenderness of "what might have been" gives balm to many a suffering soul! The wife may be unhappy, neglected, heartsick, she may even loathe him whose name she bears, but she is often upholden by the thought that he would have been wholly different! A husband may know that he has married the wrong woman, yet he bears what is, because he cannot have her who would have made life all sunshine. Few pity the one-sided love, helpless, hopeless, and without justification as it is; yet it is very real to the lonely soul. The worn-out love is the very essence of sadness! It is heart-breaking to watch the efforts of a foolish heart to keep a love dying or already dead, to see love, which would once have made a paradise, poured out at the feet of one who is only bored and not even touched by it. Nothing is so dead as a dead love—yet, even that is real!

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Miss May Crommelin takes a professional view]

Can any sensible novelist hesitate? Does a shoe-maker depreciate leather? Would you saw off the tree-branch you sit on? Now, on this subject, anybody's opinion (full-grown) is as good as another's. Let the footman bring down word that love is the drawing-room topic, and the cook will cry out, "What do they know more about it than us?" Is it not a human feeling, call it instinct or no? Surely old Sally Jones has simpler feelings than the Dowager Countess; as much experience in this. Love is just as real as a rainbow on a wet day; as—as influenza. The first may be a "pleysing payne": the latter must be a very displeasing one. But there is little fiction about either to the victims. Well, suppose love a mere brain-fantasm; an odd survival when sensible folk have swept away beliefs in witchcraft, fairies, and the virtue of fire and faggot for the wicked ones who don't say their prayers the same way we do. Still, was it not worth while to have invented it? However the idea was evoluted, just consider the glamour it throws over thorns and thistles, as we dig through life's long day of toil. As Trollope's stout widow says, when choosing her second: "It's a whiff of the rocks and the valleys." (So she had her marriage settlements tightly drawn up, to enjoy her romance comfortably.) Consider this epitaph—a real one—

"Poorly lived, and poorly died; Poorly buried, and nobody cried."

Broach this subject of love to a circle after dinner, round a good fire. Everybody laughs! The young men and maidens look conscious. What they feel is as real to them as pleasure in music they hear; in the taste of wine. Yes, and far more—while it lasts. Some elders profess scorn, because their minds are so choked with years' dust of daily cares they have forgotten how they, too, once believed love real—while it lasted! Ay! there's the rub. You are told—truthfully—that love is strong as death: inconstant as every breeze. Some declare, for them—

"In the whole wide world there was but one."

Other as honest souls confess their hearts have known, since first love, "many other lodgers." This seems clear, love is real to those who give it! Only they who care more to get it, call it moonshine and naughty names. Like figures on an Egyptian monument, each follows one who looks at another. Never one scorned, but has rejected a third.

"As Pan loved Echo, Echo loved the satyr, The satyr Lyda—and so the three went weeping."

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Miss Quiller Couch wishes Love were a pleasing fiction.]

"Pleasing fiction," forsooth; would that it were! It is a very real game, and the rules thereof are practical. I know it, for verily I myself have suffered. Let it not be understood, however, that it is as a "practical, real lover" that I have suffered. Not at all. It is that this order of beings walks abroad, and I am not of it, and I meet it, and I am pained, and I feel sorry. Could Love be but a pleasing fiction, how comfortable to sit aside and contemplate it—a trifle to talk of, a dainty to dally with, a joy to the juvenescent, a blessing to the book-writer, yet never an inconvenience. But it is a practical reality, and it has great effects. Why, I have seen good, healthy people, quite nice-tempered people, brought to a shadow by it and churned into so many pounds of incompetent irritability; so exacting about trifles, so fidgetty about catching the mail, and so careless of the health of the uninteresting majority. There was one man I knew down in a village, and he fell in love with a pretty girl—they mostly do that—but she would have nothing to say to him; and after every rejected proposal he went straight home and made a three-legged stool (he was a carpenter by trade, or perhaps it might have affected him differently). He was what one might call an importunate man, for he proposed nineteen times in all, and nineteen three-legged stools stood as silent witnesses of his importunity. He changed houses after the twelfth, for he found a sad joy in contemplating his handiwork as he sat at his lonely meals, and his first sitting-room was only twelve feet by eight. Finally, either because of his importunity, or because she disliked the thought that the wordless witnesses might fall into unsympathetic hands, the girl married the man, and scrubbed the stools nicely with soap and sand, and grew quite fond of them. And only once did she regret her surrender; and that was when it flashed across her one day that twenty would have been a prettier number: but she stifled that pain as years went on, and grew happy. Then there was Dante's love for Beatrice, which caused him to sit down and write such a lot. Most remarkable persons seem to have produced something rather excellent as the outcome of their love. I know a naturally lazy and slightly dingy boy who endured a nice clean collar every day, and it cut his neck, and his soul abhorred it, for he told me so; and he spent from seventy-five to ninety minutes over his toilet every morning, while he loved, and he knew he could dress in four minutes and a quarter, for he had done it often. Love was a great beautifier. In this case I must admit that the lover suffered more than we outsiders, except that he became irritable in his cleanliness. Love should not be scorned, even if it is real and sometimes uncomfortably practical. It is very beautiful, and lovers make a pretty sight. What I protest is, that all creatures should be lovers—or none. It is the half-and-half state of the world which is irksome.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Morley Roberts hopes Love will some day be a pleasing reality]

Ah, my gentle cocksure friends, how well you all know Love, and how ready you are to say what it is, to cut it up, to carve it, to classify it, and generally to spread it out. We live in a world of lies, and conventions, the dead leavings of an ignorant past, bind us still. Some day, perhaps, when men and women are free, Love will be a pleasing reality. It can never be so in the majority of cases so long as we play at make-believe, and teach nothing that we have learned. The good man won't teach his sons; he leaves them to learn in the gutter. The good woman keeps her daughters ignorant. As it stands it is an evil to love anyone over-much. And when we love we love over-much, for Love has been repressed till it has got savage in the race. "La privation radicale d'une chose cree lexees." All the trouble comes from this—that we men have partially created women. But Nature had something to do with her compounding. That is, perhaps, a pity from the social point of view. For Nature can't be nice and comfortable. She is only kind when we go her way. Let us remember that Love is the foundation of the world. The very protoplasmic cells from which we sprang could love. The time will come, perhaps, when, having chipped away the lies and faced the truth, we shall find reality a thousand times more pleasing than any fiction. Love is something real and wonderful, and in a natural world we shall have passed through the blood-splashed gates of Passion and be calm. Now Love is tortured, for we love ignorantly. We are like shipwrecked folk on some strange land—we know not the fruits of the trees of it. We learn the poisons by experiment, and we let others learn. This is Love the Fiction. But some day when we awake we shall know what we now dream, and Love will be always the most precious flower that grows in the garden of the soul. It has the subtle fragrance of the heaven that is our own if we walk bravely in the world, desiring truth. Under its influence we discover ourselves. We build ships for new voyages, and burst into unknown waters with our Viking shields of victory ablaze in the morning sun. The air is sharp and keen, not foetid with poisonous lies; the waters are blue and beautiful; there are shining shores about us, and marvels of a new nature on every hand. We who were in the night, and of it, become vivid with the sun. Our atheism banishes the worshipped gods of evil that are no more extant in our dogmatic creed of joy. For Truth and Beauty have guided us hand in hand, and all they ask of us is to throw away the Law of Lies and to acknowledge that the two are one.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Zangwill reviews the evidence.]

The traces left by Love in life are so numerous and diverse that I am almost tempted to the hypothesis that it really exists. There seems to be no other way of accounting for the facts. When you start learning a new language you always find yourself confronted with the verb "to love"—invariably the normal type of the first conjugation. In every language on earth the student may be heard declaring, with more zeal than discretion, that he and you and they and every other person, singular or plural, have loved, and do love, and will love. "To love" is the model verb; expressing the archetype of activity. Once you can love grammatically there is a world of things you may do without stumbling. For, strange to say, "to love," which in real life is associated with so much that is bizarre and violent, is always "regular" in grammar, and this without barring accidence of any kind. For ancient and modern tongues tell the same tale—from Hebrew to street-Arabic, from Greek to the elephantine language that was "made in Germany." Not only is "to love" deficient in no language (as home is deficient in French, and Geist in English), but it is never even "defective." No mood or tense is ever wanting—a proof of how it has been conjugated in every mood and tense of life, in association with every variety of proper and improper noun, and every pronoun at all personal. Not merely have people loved unconditionally in every language, but there is none in which they would not have loved, or might not have loved, had circumstances permitted; none in which they have not been loved, or (for hope springs eternal in the human breast) have been about to be loved. Even woman has an Active Voice in the matter; indeed, "to love" is so perfect that, compared with it, "to marry" is quite irregular. For, while "to love" is sufficient for both sexes, directly you get to marriage you find in some languages that division has crept in, and that there is one word for the use of ladies and another for gentlemen only. Turning from the evidence enshrined in language to the records of history, the same truth meets us at any date we appoint. Everywhere "'Tis love that makes the world go round," though more especially in ball-rooms. It is awful to think what would have happened if Eve had not accepted Adam. What could have attracted her if it was not love? Surely not his money, nor his family. For these she couldn't have cared a fig-leaf. Unfortunately, the daughters of Eve have not always taken after their mother. The statistics of crime and insanity testify eloquently to the reality of love, arithmetic teaching the same lesson as history and grammar. Consider, too, the piles of love at Mudie's! A million story-tellers in all periods and at all places cannot have told all stories, though they have all, alas! told the same story. They must have had mole-hills for their mountains, if not straw for their bricks. There are those who, with Bacon, consider love a variety of insanity; but it is more often merely a form of misunderstanding. When the misunderstanding is mutual, it may even lead to marriage. As a rule Beauty begets man's love, Power woman's. At least, so women tell me. But then, I am not beautiful. It must be said for the man that every lover is a species of Platonist—he identifies the Beautiful with the Good and the True. The woman's admiration has less of the ethical quality; she is dazzled, and too often feels, "If he be but true to me, what care I how false he be." The Romantic Love of the poets and novelists was of late birth; the savage and many civilisations knew it not, and philosophers explain that it could not be developed till Roman Law had developed the conception of Marriage as a Contract. Even to this day it is as rare as large paper editions of the books about it. Roughly speaking, I should say it would spring up here and there among all classes of the population, except poets and novelists. Romantic Love is the rose Evolution has grown on earthly soil. Floreat!

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Burgin thinks it all depends on the people who love.]

One morning the average man gets up, lights his pipe, roams round his rooms in all the ease of unshaven countenance and dressing-gown-clad form. Then he goes out, and meets her. There may be a hundred women in the room, or park, or tennis ground, wherever the tragedy (Love is a tragedy) commences. When the lights are low he comes back, and is low also. Wonders how men can be such brutes as to want dinner; thinks his life has been misspent; that he is unworthy to touch her hand; that he has wallowed in the fleshpots, and here is a way out of them. And if the man's nature be noble and sweet and true; if he has hitherto drifted adown the stream of circumstance because his fellows have also drifted; then, with the deepening tides of his passion, the old spirit of knight-errantry descends upon him with its mystic mantle of white samite. And slowly out of this deepening torrent of bewildered impulse and devotion is born a new man—a man with a soul—a man who can dare all things, do all things, endure all things, for the sake of the woman he loves. At the baptism of her touch he becomes whole, and shapes his life to noble ends. Even if he can't marry her, he is the better for his passion. Such a love endures until the leaves of the Judgment Book unroll; for it laughs to scorn the pitiful fools who boast of infidelity, the "male hogs in armour," as Kingsley calls them, who look upon women as toys, the sport of an idle moment, rather than the spiritual force which leavens the world, and makes it an endurable and joyous dwelling-place.

[Sidenote: And on the woman loved.]

Of course, I was speaking of good women. I once heard a story about a bad woman—a woman of the world, who was very much amused at being taken seriously by a boy who loved her. "Tell me all about it," she would say to him. "Explain what you feel, why you love me, why you believe in me. Don't you see I'm courted and admired—a social force—that men flock round me everywhere I go?" "Oh, yes," said the boy, "I see all that. But you're an angel of goodness, and can't help men liking you. If I lost faith in you, I'd kill myself." "Ah," she rejoined, "that's what you all say. You would doubt me, and live on." Then, one afternoon, he had good cause to doubt, inasmuch as her engagement to another man was announced. That evening she received a note from him: "Good-bye. If I lived on, I might doubt; it's better to die and—believe!" They told her of the—the accident that night, and she wrote a touching little paragraph about it for the Society papers before dining out.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Gribble generaliseth confidently.]

In a sense, of course, Love is necessarily a fiction, whether pleasing or otherwise; for illusion is of the essence of it. The lover, in fact, is like the artist who sees things through a temperament, and, by eliminating the irrelevant, builds up the ideal on the foundation of the real. Tityrus sees more in Amaryllis than his brother shepherds see, just as Mr. Whistler sees more in a November fog than is visible to the eye of the casual wayfarer who gets lost in it, and mingles profanity with his coughs, yet, granting this, the reality and completeness of the illusion does not admit of doubt. On no alternative hypothesis can the great majority of marriages be explained. If commonplace people saw each other as others see them, surely they would remain single all their lives. Yet most people are commonplace, and most people marry. The reality—the controlling over-mastering reality—of Love has to be assumed to make their behaviour intelligible.

[Sidenote: Having hasted from a wedding for the purpose.]

This point struck me forcibly the last time I was present at a wedding. It was a Jewish wedding, celebrated at the little synagogue behind the Haymarket. I had no acquaintance with anyone concerned in the ceremony, but had dropped in quite casually, having heard that Jewish weddings were picturesque. The one thing that impressed me more than anything else was the decided undesirability of both the bridegroom and the bride. That the bride was not comely goes for little. But her forehead indicated a limited range and low ideals; the corners of her mouth spoke of an irritable temper; her bearing was vulgar; her voice had a twang that made one long to take her by the shoulders and shake her violently. She was also escorted by gaudy female relatives, by looking at whom one could anticipate the awful possibilities of her maturity. As for the bridegroom, he was a Hebrew of the florid type. His waistcoat was protuberant; he had a red face with red whiskers sprawling all over it; he wore flash jewellery; his hair shone with pomatum; there was that in his bearing which indicated that he followed some sordid calling, such as pawnbroking, or the backing of horses on commission. Yet one could see that these two unattractive persons were really attracted by each other. A great and beautiful miracle had been performed; and the power which had performed it was that Love in which some profess to disbelieve.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Frank Mathew displays his Ignorance.]

Ignorance—says some wiseacre—is the mother of eloquence, and I take it that the less one knows of Love the easier it is to write of it. I side with those who hold that the Love described by poets and other wordy people is mainly fanciful, a flattering picture, that the best school for such writing is an unhappy affection, and that no man can want better luck than to have his heart broken, and so be made proof against lovesickness. An unrequited love runs no risk of being dulled by the prose of life. A man so fortunate as to be jilted or rejected finds his Beloved remaining beautiful and young to him when her husband sees her an unwieldy and wearisome old woman. And when at times he grows sentimental—a bachelor's privilege—he can feel again the old hopes that he never found false, and see the old perfections that were never disproved. He has a life-companion who comes only when she is wanted, and then with a "smile on her face and a rose in her hair," whose voice is always gentle, to whom wrinkles are not necessary and bills are not known.

[Sidenote: And praises ugliness.]

I am one of those who prefer the luckless adorers in novels to the conquering heroes; and hold that the quality an ideal lover needs most is ugliness, so that he may honour beauty the more. Once I knew a boy who was uglier than sin, and who wrote a story—in a sprawling hand and on ruled paper—a wonderful story, telling how an unlovely but admirable Knight, worshipping a Princess, rode out to win her by great deeds, and how when he came back triumphant, the sight of her brought his unworthiness home to him so that he dared not claim her. And I knew another boy who was good-looking, and wrote a story (during study-time, of course, and by stealth) about a handsome hero who went to Court in fine clothes, and was worshipped by all the girls. I think now that he was the manlier, but that the first would have made the more devout lover. But the drawback of luckless adorers is that their constancy has not been tried by the ordeal of success. Many a fellow who lived loyal and heart-broken would have made an unfaithful husband.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 'Q.' is surprised at his sister.]

Love, no doubt, is a subject of popular interest, but a man is always staggered to find his sister holding an opinion upon it. If I remember rightly, in the days when Lilian Quiller Couch (then aged seven) did me the honour of playing Juliet to my Romeo, the interest was mainly acrobatic, Romeo descending the gardener's ladder head-foremost, while Juliet tilted her body as far over the nursery window-sill as she could manage without breaking her neck. We "cut" the love speeches. Two years later, indeed, my sister schemed to marry me to our common governess. There was no love on my side; so she turned over the Prayer-book, hoping to find "A man may not marry his governess" in the table of Forbidden Degrees. Such a prohibition (she well knew) would be a trumpet-call to my native spirit of disobedience. But I am convinced that even then the nature of true affection did not enter into her calculations. She merely counted on my marital influence to end or mend the French irregular verbs. I am delighted that, in these later days, she sees Love to be a "practical reality." For my part, I want a definition. Popular custom bestows the name of Love on a green sickness which is in fact a part of Nature's wise economy. I will expound. Almost all young men, say between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, incline to consume much meat and do next to no work. Were there no corrective, it is clear that in a few years the face of the earth would be eaten bare as by locusts. But at this season Nature by the simplest stroke—the flush of a commonplace cheek, the warm touch of a commonplace hand—in a twinkling redresses the balance. Forthwith the ideal devourer of crops and herbs not only loses his appetite, but arising, smacks the earth with a hoe till the clods fly and the fields laugh with harvest. Thereon he mops his steaming brow, bedecks him with a bunch of white ribbons, and jogs jovially to church arm in arm with the pretty cause of all this beneficent disturbance. And the spectacle is mighty taking and commendable; but you'll excuse me for holding that it is not Love. It bears about the same relation to Love that Bumble-puppy bears to good whist. Among the eccentricities that make up the Average Man I find none more diverting than his complacent belief that he is, or has been, or will certainly some day be, in love. As a matter of fact, the capacity to love belongs to one man or woman in ten thousand. Listen to Matthew Arnold:

"But in the world I learnt, what there Thou wilt too surely one day prove, That will, that energy, though rare, Are yet far, far less rare than love."

I go further and believe it rarer even than Genius. Indeed, the capacity to love, is a specialised form of genius. You understand that I am not commending it. Its possessors are often disreputable and almost always unhappy. Their recompense is that they, and they only, have seen the splendours of the passion, and vibrated to the shaking inner music of the sheep-boy's pipe.

THE END