dy librettos, and (on the contrary side) chaperones and
the _gendarmerie_ make it out. The physical sensation, far from being
pleasant, is intensely uncomfortable--the suspension of respiration,
indeed, quickly resolves itself into a feeling of suffocation--and the
posture necessitated by the approximation of lips and lips is
unfailingly a constrained and ungraceful one. Theoretically, a man
kisses a woman perpendicularly, with their eyes, those "windows of the
soul," synchronizing exactly. But actually, on account of the
incompressibility of the nasal cartilages, he has to incline either his
or her head to an angle of at least 60 degrees, and the result is that
his right eye gazes insanely at the space between her eyebrows, while
his left eye is fixed upon some vague spot behind her. An instantaneous
photograph of such a maneuvre, taken at the moment of incidence, would
probably turn the stomach of even the most romantic man, and force him,
in sheer self-respect, to renounce kissing as he has renounced leap-frog
and walking on stilts. Only a woman (for women are quite devoid of
aesthetic feeling) could survive so damning a picture.

But the most embarrassing moment, in kissing, does not come during the
actual kiss (for at that time the sensation of suffocation drives out
all purely psychical feelings), but immediately afterward. What is one
to say to the woman then? The occasion obviously demands some sort of
remark. One has just received (in theory) a great boon; the silence
begins to make itself felt; there stands the fair one, obviously
waiting. Is one to thank her? Certainly that would be too transparent a
piece of hypocrisy, too flaccid a banality. Is one to tell her that one
loves her? Obviously, there is danger in such assurances, and beside,
one usually doesn't, and a lie is a lie. Or is one to descend to chatty
commonplaces--about the weather, literature, politics, the war? The
practical impossibility of solving the problem leads almost inevitably
to a blunder far worse than any merely verbal one: one kisses her again,
and then again, and so on, and so on. The ultimate result is satiety,
repugnance, disgust; even the girl herself gets enough.

XI

A TRUE ASCETIC

Herbert Spencer's objection to swearing, of which so much has been made
by moralists, was not an objection to its sinfulness but an objection to
its charm. In brief, he feared comfort, satisfaction, joy. The boarding
houses in which he dra