sh to call attention to the fact that even
in abnormal states modern love preserves its purity. The most eminent
authority on mental pathology, Professor Krafft-Ebing, says,
concerning erotomania:

"The kernel of the whole matter is the delusion of
being singled out and loved by a person of the other
sex, who regularly belongs to a higher social class.
And it should be noted that the love felt by the
patient toward this person is a romantic, ecstatic, but
entirely 'Platonic' affection."

I have among my notes a remarkable case, relating to that most awful
of diseases that can befall a woman--nymphomania.[43] The patient
relates:

"I have also noticed that when my affections are
aroused, they counteract animal passion. I could never
love a man because he was a man. My tendency is to
worship the good I find in friends. I feel just the
same toward those of my own sex. If they show any
regard for me, the touch of a hand has power to take
away all morbid feelings."

A MODERN SENTIMENT

There are all sorts and conditions of love. To those who have known
only the primitive (sensual) sort, the conditions described in the
foregoing pages will seem strange and fantastic if not
fictitious--that is, the products of the writers' imaginations.
Fantastic they are, no doubt, and romantic, but that they are real I
can vouch for by my own experience whenever I was in love, which
happened several times. When I was a youth of seventeen I fell in love
with a beautiful, black-eyed young woman, a Spanish-American of
Californian stock. She was married, and I am afraid she was amused at
my mad infatuation. Did I try to flirt with her? A smile, a glance of
her eyes, was to me the seventh heaven beyond which there could be no
other. I would not have dared to touch her hand, and the thought of
kissing her was as much beyond my wildest flights of fancy as if she
had been a real goddess. To me she was divine, utterly unapproachable
by mortal. Every day I used to sit in a lonely spot of the forest and
weep; and when she went away I felt as if the son had gone out and all
the world were plunged into eternal darkness.

Such is romantic love--a supersensual feeling of crystalline purity
from which all gross matter has been distilled. But the love that
includes this ingredient is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand
years old, and not to be found among savages, barbarians, o