gestion, and
compromised herself and her family. Her seducer was poor, so
that it was not his fortune that attracted her. She knew very
well that this union could lead to nothing, but could not
resist, and eloped with him. Later on she came to her senses and
left him.

According to an old proverb, young girls laugh at old men and only
marry them reluctantly or for their money; but in reality this is by
no means always true.

=Amorous Intoxication.=--Let us now compare these phenomena with those
of ordinary life called _amorous intoxication_. The affinities are at
once apparent. A man and a woman meet and take a fancy for each other.
The reciprocal action of looks, speech and touch, in fact all the
apparatus of the senses and the mind, awakens in both of them
sentiments of sympathy and sexual desire which mutually strengthens
each other. Sexual desire invests every action and appearance of the
loved object with an ever-increasing halo of charm and splendor, and
this halo of sexual origin increases in its turn the sentiments of
sympathy; and the sentiments of sympathy increase the sexual desire.
In this way mutual suggestions grow like a snowball, and rapidly
attain the culminating point of amorous intoxication, or what is
called being _madly in love_.

All this depends only on reciprocal illusion. The more violent and
foolish the amorous intoxication, without preparation or reflexion,
and the less the individuals know each other, the more rapidly these
illusions collapse, like a castle of cards, as soon as some douche of
cold water sobers the two lovers. Thus indifference, disgust, and even
hatred, follow "love."

The suggestive element in love is here apparent. Just as a hypnotized
person will eagerly swallow a raw potato which he takes for an orange;
so will a person madly in love regard an ugly or wicked girl as a
goddess, or an amorous girl find her ideal of chivalry and manliness
in an egoistic Don Juan.

The affinity is still more evident when the amorous intoxication is
only on one side, while the other plays the part of seducer. When
motives of pecuniary interest are not the only cause of seduction, and
even often when they are, the seducer generally brings into play his
sexual appetite, but only as a collaborator in his work of seduction
without allowing himself to be dominated by it. In this case one is
the seducer and the other the seduced. The seducer plays the part of
the hypnotiz