nt to love of little moment. If love were a matter of
contract, of simple intellectual consent, of question and answer, it would
never have come into the world at all. Love appeared as art from the
first, and the subsequent developments of the summary methods of reason
and speech cannot abolish that fundamental fact. This is scarcely realized
by those ill-advised lovers who consider that the first step in
courtship--and perhaps even the whole of courtship--is for a man to ask a
woman to be his wife. That is so far from being the case that it
constantly happens that the premature exhibition of so large a demand at
once and for ever damns all the wooer's chances. It is lamentable, no
doubt, that so grave and fateful a matter as that of marriage should so
often be decided without calm deliberation and reasonable forethought. But
sexual relationships can never, and should never, be merely a matter of
cold calculation. When a woman is suddenly confronted by the demand that
she should yield herself up as a wife to a man who has not yet succeeded
in gaining her affections she will not fail to find--provided she is
lifted above the cold-hearted motives of self-interest--that there are
many sound reasons why she should not do so. And having thus squarely
faced the question in cool blood and decided it, she will henceforth,
probably, meet that wooer with a tunic of steel enclosing her breast.

"Love must be _revealed_ by acts and not _betrayed_ by words. I
regard as abnormal the extraordinary method of a hasty avowal
beforehand; for that represents not the direct but the reflex
path of transmission. However sweet and normal the avowal may be
when once reciprocity has been realized, as a method of conquest
I consider it dangerous and likely to produce the reverse of the
result desired." I take these wise words from a thoughtful "Essai
sur l'Amour" (_Archives de Psychologie_, 1904) by a
non-psychological Swiss writer who is recording his own
experiences, and who insists much on the predominance of the
spiritual and mental element in love.

It is worthy of note that this recognition that direct speech is
out of place in courtship must not be regarded as a refinement of
civilization. Among primitive peoples everywhere it is perfectly
well recognized that the offer of love, and its acceptance or its
refusal, must be made by actions symbolically, and not by the
crude