ver, although we are accustomed to
assume that all young men have a natural aptitude for love, I think
myself that it is not so; that we have to acquire, by long practice and
thought, the ability and the temperament to achieve anything beyond
tawdry intrigues and banal courtships, spurious imitations which are
exhibited and extensively advertised as the real thing. And again, while
it may be true, as La Rochefoucauld declares in his "Maxims"--the thin
book you have so often found by my chair in the garden--that a woman is
in love with her first lover, and ever after is in love with love, it
seems to me that with men the reverse is true. We spend years in falling
in and out of love with love. The woman is only a lay figure whom we
invest with the vague splendours of our snobbish and inexperienced
imagination. A great passion demands as much knowledge and experience
and aptitude as a great idea. I would almost say it requires as much
talent as a work of art; indeed, the passion, the idea, and the work of
art are really only three manifestations, three dimensions, of the same
emotion. And the simple and sufficient reason why this book should be
dedicated to you is, that but for you it would not have been written.

And very often, I think, women marry men simply to keep them from ever
encountering passion. Englishwomen especially. They are afraid of it.
They think it wicked. So they marry him. Though they suspect that he
will be able to sustain it when he has gotten more experience, they know
that they themselves will never be the objects of it, so they trick him
with one of the clever imitations I have mentioned. Everything is done
to keep out the woman who can inspire an authentic passion. And the act
of duping him is invariably attributed to what is called the mothering
instinct, a craving to protect a young man from his natural destiny, the
great adventure of life!

However, after a number of years of sea-faring, during which I was
obsessed by this sterile allegiance, and permitted many interesting
possibilities to pass me without investigating them, I was once more in
London, in late autumn. I call this sort of fidelity sterile because it
is static, whereas all genuine emotion is dynamic--a species of growth.
And I realized that beneath my conventional desire to see her again lay
a reluctance to discover my folly. But convention was too strong for me,
and by a fairly easy series of charitable arrangements I met her. An