blame him for not feeling them as for blaming the tiger
because he is fierce and cruel. But it was the whim I could
not understand.

I could not believe that Strickland had fallen in love with
Blanche Stroeve. I did not believe him capable of love.
That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part,
but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others;
there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect,
an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure -- if not
unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously
conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.
These were not traits which I could imagine in Strickland.
Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most
clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realise that his love
will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion, and,
knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than reality.
It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same
time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer
an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose
foreign to his ego. Love is never quite devoid of
sentimentality, and Strickland was the least inclined to that
infirmity of any man I have known. I could not believe that
he would ever suffer that possession of himself which love is;
he could never endure a foreign yoke. I believed him capable
of uprooting from his heart, though it might be with agony, so
that he was left battered and ensanguined, anything that came
between himself and that uncomprehended craving that urged him
constantly to he knew not what. If I have succeeded at all in
giving the complicated impression that Strickland made on me,
it will not seem outrageous to say that I felt he was at once
too great and too small for love.

But I suppose that everyone's conception of the passion is
formed on his own idiosyncrasies, and it is different with
every different person. A man like Strickland would love in a
manner peculiar to himself. It was vain to seek the analysis
of his emotion.

Chapter XXXI

Next day, though I pressed him to remain, Stroeve left me.
I offered to fetch his things from the studio, but he insisted
on going himself; I think he hoped they had not thought of
getting them together, so that he would have an opportunity of
seeing his wife again and perhaps inducing her to come back to him.
But he found his traps waiting for him in the porter's