on. The last might have saved him; for
he was ere long to pass into a new sphere, where all his faculties were
to be tried and exercised, and his life to be filled with interest and
effort. But it was not left to engineering; another and more influential
aim was to be set before him. He must, in any case, have fallen in love;
in any case, his love would have ruled his life; and the question of
choice was, for the descendant of two such families, a thing of
paramount importance. Innocent of the world, fiery, generous, devoted as
he was, the son of the wild Jacksons and the facile Jenkins might have
been led far astray. By one of those partialities that fill men at once
with gratitude and wonder his choosing was directed well. Or are we to
say that, by a man's choice in marriage, as by a crucial merit, he
deserves his fortune? One thing at least reason may discern: that a man
but partly chooses, he also partly forms, his helpmate; and he must in
part deserve her, or the treasure is but won for a moment to be lost.
Fleeming chanced, if you will (and indeed all these opportunities are as
"random as blind-man's-buff"), upon a wife who was worthy of him; but he
had the wit to know it, the courage to wait and labour for his prize,
and the tenderness and chivalry that are required to keep such prizes
precious. Upon this point he has himself written well, as usual with
fervent optimism, but as usual (in his own phrase) with a truth sticking
in his head.

"Love," he wrote, "is not an intuition of the person most suitable to
us, most required by us; of the person with whom life flowers and bears
fruit. If this were so, the chances of our meeting that person would be
small indeed; intuition would often fail; the blindness of love would
then be fatal as it is proverbial. No, love works differently, and in
its blindness lies its strength. Man and woman, each strongly desires
to be loved, each opens to the other that heart of ideal aspirations
which they have often hid till then; each, thus knowing the ideal of the
other, tries to fulfil that ideal; each partially succeeds. The greater
the love, the greater the success; the nobler the idea of each, the more
durable, the more beautiful the effect. Meanwhile the blindness of each
to the other's defects enables the transformation to proceed
[unobserved], so that when the veil is withdrawn (if it ever is, and
this I do not know) neither knows that any change has occurred in the
person who