for the commoners and destruction to superstition. I put my hand
out to you in joy. The joy is in unholy worship of a fetish, the pain
that there is no joy also deference to a fetish. Your creed thunders
"Thou shalt not." Love is a thing of yesterday. No room for anything
that intimately concerns the self. But what are the apostles of the
young thought preaching if it is not the right of men to their own, and
what would it avail them to come into their own if life be stripped of
romance?

I am dissatisfied because you are willing to live as others must live.
You should stay aristocrat. Ferdinand Lassalle dressed with elegance for
his working-men audiences, with the hope, he said, of reminding them
that there was something better than their shabbiness. You are of the
favoured, Herbert. It devolves upon you to endear your life to yourself.
You do not agree with me. You do not believe that love is the law which
controls freedom and life. Slave to your theory and rebel to the law,
you lose your soul and imperil another's.

"Gently! Gently!" I say to myself. Old sorrows and wrongs oppress me
and I grow harsh. My heat only helps to convince you that my position is
not based on the _rational rightness_ you hold so essential and that
therefore it is unlivable. I will state calmly, then, that it is wrong
to marry without love. "For the perpetuation of the species"--that is
noble of you! So you strip yourself of the thousand years of
civilisation that have fostered you, you abandon your prerogative as a
creature high in the scale of existence to obey an instinct and fulfil a
function? You say: "These men and women will marry, and the work of the
world go on just as it did before. Shuffle them about and the work of
the world would yet go on." And you are content. You feel no need of
anything different from this condition.

Believe me, Herbert, these million men and women will not let you
shuffle them about. There are forces stronger than force, shadows more
real than reality. We know that the need of the unhungered for the one
friend, one comrade, one mate, is good. We honour the love that persists
in loving. More beautiful than starlight is the face of the lover when
the Voice and the Vision enfold him. The race is consecrated to the
worship of idea, and the lover who lays his all on the altar of romance
(which is idea) is at one with the race. The arms of the unloved girl
close about the formless air and more real than her lo