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 Viki