an life (which
includes love) come inside of it. Wherefore, certainly, I am not outside
our province when I demand of you to bring your philosophy of love into
like accord.

Incidentally, I will state that I _have_ fallen in love. I have grown
feverish with desire, gone mad with dumb yearning. I have felt my
intellect lose dominion, and learned that I was only a garmented beast,
for all the many inventions very like the other beasts ungarmented.
Nay, I am no cold-blooded theorist, no thick-hided dogmatist; nor am I a
chastely simple young man mooning in virginal innocence. My
generalisations have been tempered in the heats of passion, and what I
know I know, and without hearsay.

I have seen a learned man, drunk with wine, interrogate the new states
of consciousness of his unwonted condition, and so doing, gain a more
comprehensive psychological insight. So I, with my loves. I was impelled
toward the women I shall presently particularise. I asked why the
impulsion. I reasoned to see if there were a difference between these
illicit passions of mine and the illicit passions of my respectable and
respected friends. And I found no difference. Separated from codes and
conventions, shorn of imagination, divested of romance, stripped naked
down to the core of the matter, it was old Mother Nature crying through
us, every man and woman of us, for progeny. Her one unceasing and
eternal cry--PROGENY! PROGENY! PROGENY!

Just as little girls, instinctively foreshadowing motherhood, play with
dolls, so children feel vague sex promptings, and in sweetly ridiculous
ways love and quarrel and make up after the approved fashion of lovers.
You loved little girls in pigtails and pinafores. We all did. And in our
lives there is nothing fairer and more joyful to look back upon than
those same little pigtails and pinafores. But I shall pass the child
loves by, and instance first my calf love.

Do you remember the incident of the torn jacket and the blackened
eyes?--so inexplicable at the time. Try as you would, neither you nor
Waring could get anything out of me. Oh, believe me, it was tragic! I
was fifteen. Fifteen, and athrill with a strange new pulse; flushed, as
the dawn, with the promise of day. And, of course, I thought it was the
day, that I loved as a man loved, and that no man ever loved more. Well,
well, I laugh now. I was only fifteen--a young calf who went out and
butted heads with another calf in the back pasture.

She was a