ee soft inflections in her voice,
which for some absurd reason or other drew him to her side and so
bewitched him that he told her half his secrets and looked into her eyes
all that he could not tell, in less time than it would have takes him to
discuss the champion paper of the last Quarterly with the admirable
"Portia." Heu, quanto minus! How much more was that lost image to him
than all it left on earth!

The study of love is very much like that of meteorology. We know that
just about so much rain will fall in a season; but on what particular day
it will shower is more than we can tell. We know that just about so much
love will be made every year in a given population; but who will rain his
young affections upon the heart of whom is not known except to the
astrologers and fortune-tellers. And why rain falls as it does and why
love is made just as it is are equally puzzling questions.

The woman a man loves is always his own daughter, far more his daughter
than the female children born to him by the common law of life. It is
not the outside woman, who takes his name, that he loves: before her
image has reached the centre of his consciousness, it has passed through
fifty many-layered nerve-strainers, been churned over by ten thousand
pulse-beats, and reacted upon by millions of lateral impulses which bandy
it about through the mental spaces as a reflection is sent back and
forward in a saloon lined with mirrors. With this altered image of the
woman before him, his preexisting ideal becomes blended. The object of
his love is in part the offspring of her legal parents, but more of her
lover's brain. The difference between the real and the ideal objects of
love must not exceed a fixed maximum. The heart's vision cannot unite
them stereoscopically into a single image, if the divergence passes
certain limits. A formidable analogy, much in the nature of a proof,
with very serious consequences, which moralists and match-makers would do
well to remember! Double vision with the eyes of the heart is a
dangerous physiological state, and may lead to missteps and serious
falls.

Whether Dudley Veneer would ever find a breathing image near enough to
his ideal one, to fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not, was
very doubtful. Some gracious and gentle woman, whose influence would
steal upon him as the first low words of prayer after that interval of
silent mental supplication known to one of our simpler forms of