e them, romantic
love, which was so slow in coming, would disappear again, leaving only
sensual appetite, which may be (selfishly) fastidious and intense, but
has no depth, duration, or altruistic nobility, and which, when
satiated, cares no more for the object for which it had temporarily
hungered. It is these secondary sexual characters, with their subtle
and endless variations, that have given individual preference such a
wide field of choice that every lover can find a girl after his heart
and taste. A savage is like a gardener who has only one kind of
flowers to choose between--all of one color too; whereas we, with our
diverse secondary characters, our various intermixtures of
nationalities, our endless shades of blonde and brunette, and
differences in manners and education can have our choice among the
lilies, roses, violets, pansies, daisies, and thousands of other
flowers--or the girls named after them. Samuel Baker says there are no
broken hearts in Africa. Why should there be when individuals are so
similar that if a man loses his girl he can easily find another just
like her in color, face, rotundity, and grossness? A civilized lover
would mourn the loss of his bride--though he were offered his choice
of the beauties of Baltimore--because it would be _absolutely
impossible to duplicate her_.

In that last line lies the explanation of one of the mysteries of
modern love--its stubborn fidelity to the beloved after the choice has
been made. But there is another mystery of individual preference that
calls for an explanation--its capriciousness, apparent or real, in
making a choice--that quality which has made the poets declare so
often that "love is blind." On this point much confusion of ideas
prevails.

Matters are simplified if we first dispose of those numerous cases in
which the individual preference is only approximate. If a girl of
eighteen has the choice between a man of sixty and a youth of twenty,
she will, if she exercises a _personal_ preference, take the youth, as
a matter of course, though he may be far from her ideal. Such
preference is generic rather than individual. Again, in most cases of
first love, as I have remarked elsewhere (_R.L.P.B_., 139) "man falls
in love with woman, woman with man, not with a particular man or
woman." Young men and women inherit, from a long series of ancestors,
a disposition to love which at puberty reveals itself in vague
longings and dreams. The "bump of amativ