h conversation.
Your letter, partly open, was on the table before us, and my eyes fell
upon it often as I wondered what it would mean to Hester's brother--if
he could read it. I no longer think only of you.

I reject your definition of love. It is not a disorder of the mind and
body, nor is it solely the instrument of reproduction. I reject and
resent your distinction between the pre-nuptial and post-nuptial states
of feelings. Further, I hold that marriage may not be based on
affection alone, and I disagree with you that population is better than
principle. Children need not be brought into the world at any cost.

Love is not a disorder, but a growth. There is spiritual as well as
physical growth. Some men and women never grow up strong enough to love.
Their development is arrested, or they are, from the beginning, poor
creatures born of starvelings, and perhaps fated to give birth to pale,
sapless beings like themselves. Others there are who love, and this is
no ill chance, no disease of the mind and body calling for psychiater
and physician. It is a strength, a becoming, a fulfilment. Let us reason
from the effect to the cause. How does this madness manifest itself? Not
in weakness. You never saw a man or woman in love who was the worse for
it. The lover carries all things before him, and not for himself alone,
but for a larger world than ever had been his. He who loves one must
perforce love all the world and all the unborn worlds. This is the way
life goes, which is another way of saying it is a scientific fact. That
which makes men capable of consecration is not a disorder of the mind
and body. It is the greatest of all forces, and it turns the wrangling
and grabbing human creature into an inspired poet.

And the cause? The passion for perpetuation and the imagination. We
agree. But there are other and more immediate needs than the need of
perpetuation that call out love, needs that are peculiarly of the
present, being bound up with the steady outreaching for help, for
fellowship in the jerky journey through the universe. If love were no
more than an instrument of reproduction, you would be right in
maintaining that the fastidiousness I insist on is unnecessary and
unnatural. If love were that and that alone, there would be no love,
which is a paradox indeed.

"Because of our souls' yearning that we meet
And mix in soul through flesh, which yours and mine
Wear and impress, and make their visib