le selves,--
All which means, for the love of you and me,
Let us become one flesh, being one soul."

I dare a formula: In the beginning love arose in the passion for
perpetuation; to-day, the passion for perpetuation arises in love. Just
as we put ourselves in the way of natural selection, pitting the
microcosm against the macrocosm in a passion of ethical feeling, just so
do we reverse for ourselves processes that seem indeed to have all the
force of law. This reversal is civilisation.

The lover is impelled to perpetuate himself in the Here and the Now. The
law of life exacts from him the tribute of love. Imagination gives the
lover the key to the object of his love. He enters and he beholds only
the ideal which is hers; for him her clay self and the mere facts of her
do not exist. The conditions of love are inherent in civilisation. When
purpose is high and feeling rich, when "the everlasting possession of
the good" is desired, then is heard the I Am of love.

Now to my definition. Negatively, love is not a disorder of the mind and
body, not a madness, since it arises in the eternally most valuable,
since it is the culmination of high processes, and since it makes for
sanity of vision and strength and happiness. Positively, love is the
awakening of the personality to the beauty and worth of some one being,
caused by the passion for perpetuation and by imagination. It is a
desire to hold to the good everlastingly, and to merge with it.

Aristotle proved to the satisfaction of his time that women have fewer
teeth than men. Aristotle was a great man, and besides being a
philosopher was the foremost scientist of his day. I cannot help
thinking of this prodigious blunder. Perhaps (who knows?) the same
famous fate which a sexual classification of teeth enjoys awaits a
definition calling love a disorder.

I will continue to-morrow. A note has just been given me calling me to
Earl, who is ill, but not seriously. Barbara has prescribed for him a
game of chess. The desire to see you again has got into my blood. I
think I shall be in the new West and with you before long.

Your friend always,
DANE KEMPTON.

XVI

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME

LONDON.
Sunday morning.

I must proceed with the three other points of my letter, so I shall stay
here and write, though there is a sharp breeze this morning and a
coquettishly escaping sunlight, and something tugs at me to go out upon
the city streets. It is