he new love is no sooner found than the old becomes grievous, a
burden; by a malignant witchcraft the old charms have grown veritably
repellent, and "all the heaven that was" irretrievably disenchanted.
Which is the illusion, one wonders,--the original enchantment or the
final disenchantment?

When, however, love can give a better account of its preferences than
this, and point out, say in Jenny, many good reasons why she was at
first and must for ever remain love-worthy, whatever rival reasons for
love another woman may bring; when too there is added to those reasons
for loving Jenny the dear habit of loving her, the gratitude--love must
forgive the word--which has accumulated interest upon the original love,
the beauties that have been gained by becoming familiarities, and the
familiarities that have become beauties by very use,--well, really, is
it such a hardship, after all, for a man to be expected to keep true to
his Jenny?

Oh! but passion doesn't reason like this. Indeed, O passionate reader!
Is passion, then, merely a wild beast, a savage, a blind fire? Must it
forfeit its fine name if it remembers mercy or owns duty? Is it any less
passion because it refuses sometimes to glut itself, and dares to go
hungry all its days instead; any less passion because it chooses to burn
up its own heart in an agony of its own consuming fire?

Mere violence is not a strength but a weakness in passion, and sometimes
there is more passion in patience than in anything else in the world. A
passion that knows not pity is merely a daemonic possession, and should
be taken to the madhouse.

I confess that there is nothing in the world more amazing to me than the
easy brutality with which one hears of some men doing what is called
"breaking off their engagements." Only a new face has to show itself,
and the old face at once disappears with a blow and a wail.

Murder, of course, is one way out of many difficult situations, and the
worst kinds of murder are by no means capital offences. It is true that
all engagements are not made by the same vital bonds as that of Jenny's
and Theophil's, but many are. For a man wilfully to break an engagement
means sometimes that the whole love-life in a woman is atrophied, all
that made her woman stabbed to the quick of life.

Yet no one who knows anything of women can have failed to remark that
women themselves are even more brutal in this matter. Nothing could
exceed the executioner-like prompt