ne. She pursued him with attentions,
and when his passion was dormant sought to excite it, for then
at least she had the illusion of holding him. Perhaps she
knew with her intelligence that the chains she forged only
aroused his instinct of destruction, as the plate-glass window
makes your fingers itch for half a brick; but her heart,
incapable of reason, made her continue on a course she knew
was fatal. She must have been very unhappy. But the
blindness of love led her to believe what she wanted to be
true, and her love was so great that it seemed impossible to
her that it should not in return awake an equal love.

But my study of Strickland's character suffers from a greater
defect than my ignorance of many facts. Because they were
obvious and striking, I have written of his relations to
women; and yet they were but an insignificant part of his life.
It is an irony that they should so tragically have
affected others. His real life consisted of dreams and of
tremendously hard work.

Here lies the unreality of fiction. For in men, as a rule,
love is but an episode which takes its place among the other
affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels
gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few
men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and
they are not very interesting ones; even women, with whom the
subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.
They are flattered and excited by them, but have an uneasy
feeling that they are poor creatures. But even during the
brief intervals in which they are in love, men do other things
which distract their mind; the trades by which they earn their
living engage their attention; they are absorbed in sport;
they can interest themselves in art. For the most part, they
keep their various activities in various compartments, and
they can pursue one to the temporary exclusion of the other.
They have a faculty of concentration on that which occupies
them at the moment, and it irks them if one encroaches on the
other. As lovers, the difference between men and women is
that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

With Strickland the sexual appetite took a very small place.
It was unimportant. It was irksome. His soul aimed elsewhither.
He had violent passions, and on occasion desire seized
his body so that he was driven to an orgy of lust, but
he hated the instincts that robbed him of his self-possession.
I