eets _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: Grib