en during these beautiful warm
evenings--it is always the man who looks supremely sheepish; the woman
doesn't "turn a hair." She simply stares at the intruder as if she
wanted him to see for himself how very attractive she is. The man, on
the other hand, never meets the stranger's eyes. His expression
invariably shows that he is wishing for the earth to open--which, in
parenthesis, it never does when you most want it to. But the girl is
quite unembarrassed. Even when it is she who is making love, a staring
and smiling crowd will not force her to desist. She just goes on
stroking her lover's face and kissing him. But the man looks a perfect
fool, and, I am sure, feels it. It seems indeed, as if he would cry to
the onlookers, "Don't blame me. It's human nature. I shall get over
it quite soon!" But the girl seems to say: "By all means--watch us!
This, for me, is 'Der Tag'!" No, you can't disconcert a woman in
love--it makes her quite vain-glorious.

I wonder why love always seems such a splendid "joke" to those who are
out of it, when it was a paralysing reality while they were in it. And
yet, as one looks back upon one's love affairs one invariably refers to
the incident as the time when "I made a fool of myself." And yet love
is no laughing matter. Considering that ninety-nine per cent. of our
novels and plays are about nothing else; considering that our songs and
our poetry, and the scandal we like to hear, all centre around this one
theme, we really ought to take it more seriously. But if we see two
lovers making love to each other we laugh outright. It is very
strange! I suppose it is that everybody else's love affairs are
ridiculous; only our own possess the splendour of a Greek tragedy.
Perhaps we share with Nature her sense of humour, which makes love one
of the biggest practical jokes in life. So we jeer at love in order to
hide our own "soreness," just as we laugh at the man who sits down
suddenly in Piccadilly because his foot stepped on a banana skin--we
laugh at him because it wasn't we who sat down. Altogether love is a
conundrum, and we laugh at the answer Fate gives us because we dare not
show the world we want to cry. Laughter is the one armour which only
the gods can pierce. Lovers never laugh--at least, they never laugh at
love--that is why we can turn them into such glorious figures of fun.

But I always wonder why a woman of a "thousand loves" assumes a kind of
"halo," when a man