lt of their
climate, which washes the vitality out of one, or of their religion,
which does not encourage emotional adventure to any notable degree. The
point is that the average young Englishman is more easily fooled about
love than about anything else in the world. He accepts almost any
substitute offered to him in an attractive package. I know this because
I was an average young Englishman and I was extensively fooled about
love. The whole social fabric of English life is engaged in
manufacturing spurious counterfeits of the genuine article. And I fell,
as we say in America, for a particularly cheap imitation called Ideal
Love.

Now you must not imagine that, because I had, as I say, fallen in love
with Ideal Love, I was therefore free from the dream-woman of whom I
have spoken. Not at all. She hovered in my thoughts and complicated my
emotions. But I can hear you saying: "Never mind the dream-woman. Tell
me about the real one, your ideal." Well, listen. She was small, thin,
and of a dusky pallor, and her sharp, clever features were occasionally
irradiated with a dry, satirical smile that had the cold, gleaming
concentration of the beam of a searchlight. She had a large number of
accomplishments, a phrase we English use in a most confusing sense,
since she had never accomplished anything and never would. But the ideal
part of her lay in her magnificent conviction that she and her class
were the final embodiment of desirable womanhood. It was not she whom I
loved. Indeed she was a rather disagreeable girl with a mania for using
men's slang which she had picked up from college-boys. It was this ideal
of English womanhood which deluded me, and which scared me for many
years from examining her credentials.

That is what it amounted to. For years after I had discovered that she
thought me beneath her because I was not a college-boy, she continued
to impose her personality upon me. Whenever I imagined for a moment that
I might love some other kind of woman, I would see that girl's
disparaging gray eyes regarding me with an attentive, satirical smile.
And this obsession appeared to my befuddled mentality as a species of
sacrifice. I imagined that I was remaining true to my Ideal! If you
demand where I obtained these ideas, I can only confess that I had read
of such sterile allegiances in books, and I had not yet abandoned the
illusion that life was to be learned from literature, instead of
literature from life. And, moreo