demure little coquette, Celia Genoine, Professor Genoine's
daughter, if you will recollect. "Ah," I hear you remonstrate, "but she
was a woman." Just so. Fifteen and twenty-two is usually the way of calf
loves. I invested her with all the glow and colour of first youth, and
in her presence became a changed being. I blushed if she looked at me;
trembled at the touch of her hand or the scent of her hair. To be in
her presence was to be closeted with the awfulness and splendour of God.
I read immortality in her eyes. A smile from her blinded me, a gentle
word or caressing look and I went faint and dizzy, and I was content to
lurk in some corner and gaze upon her secretly with all my soul. And I
took long, solitary walks, with book of verse beneath my arm, and
learned to love as lovers had loved before me.

Sufficient romance was engendered for me to pass more than one night
worshipping beneath her window. I mooned and sentimentalised and fell
into a gentle melancholy, until you and Waring began to worry over an
early decline, to consult specialists, and by trick and stratagem to
entice me into eating more and reading less. But she married--ah, I have
forgotten whom. Anyway, she married, and there was trouble about it,
too, and I bade adieu to love forever.

Then came the love of my whelpage. I was twenty, and she a mad, wanton
creature, wonderful and unmoral and filled with life to the brim. My
blood pounds hot even now as I conjure her up. The ungarmented beast, my
dear Dane, the great primordial ungarmented beast, mighty to procreate,
indomitable in battle, invincible in love. Love? Do I not know it? Can
I not understand how that splendid fighting animal, Antony, quartered
the globe with his sword and pillowed his head between the slim breasts
of Egyptian Cleopatra while that hard-won world crashed to wrack and
ruin?

As I say, This was the love of my whelpage, and it was vigorous,
masterful, masculine. There was no sentimentalising, no fond foolishness
of youth; nor was there that cool, calm poise which comes of the
calculation and discretion of age. Man and woman, we were in full tide,
strong, simple, and elemental. Life rioted in our veins; we were
a-bubble with the ferment; and it is out of such abundance that Mother
Nature has always exacted her progeny. From the strictly emotional and
naturalistic viewpoint, I must consider it, even now, the perfect love.
But it was decreed that I should develop into an intellec