ion of it herself,
however; she will make that discovery later on. I should like to have
the power to render myself invisible; but no, I beg pardon, I should
like to be present in astral body when her nature awakens. I have
always wanted to study the successive psychological evolutions of a
woman in love. Not of the ordinary compound of the domestic and the
fashionable; there is nothing exciting in that; and besides,
our realistic novelists have rendered such researches on my part
superfluous; but of a type, small, but each member of which is built
up of infinite complexities--like this girl. The nature would awaken
with a sudden, mighty shock, not creep toward the light with slow,
well-regulated steps--but, bah! what is the use of indulging in
boneless imaginings? One can never tell what a woman of that sort will
think and feel, until her experience has been a part of his own. And
there is no possibility of my falling in love with her, even did I
wish it, which I certainly do not. The man who fascinates is not the
man who loves. Pardon my modesty, most charming of grandmothers, if
your soul really lurks behind that wonderful likeness of yours, as
I sometimes think it does, but a man cannot have the double power of
making many others feel and of feeling himself. At least, so it seems
to me. Love lightly roused is held as lightly, and one loses one's
respect for even the passion in the abstract. Of what value can a
thing be which springs into life for a trick of manner, an atom or two
more of that negative quality called personal magnetism, while wiser
and better men pass by unnoticed? One naturally asks, What is love?
A spiritual enthusiasm which a cold-blooded analyst would call
sentimentality, or its correlative, a fever of the senses? Neither is
a very exalted set of conditions. I have been through both more
than once, and if my attacks have been light, I have been the better
enabled to study my fair inspiration. I never discovered that she
felt more deeply; simply more strongly, more tempestuously, after the
nature of women. Her feelings were not more complex, they were merely
more strongly accentuated. A woman in love imagines that she is the
pivot on which the world revolves. A general may immortalize himself,
an emperor be assassinated and his empire plunged into a French
Revolution, and her passing interest is not roused; nor is she
unapt to wonder how others can be interested in matters so purely
impersonal. Sh