"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

There is only one event in life which really astonishes a man and
startles him out of his prepared opinions. Everything else befalls him
very much as he expected. Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable
variety indeed, but with little that is either startling or intense;
they form together no more than a sort of background, or running
accompaniment to the man's own reflections; and he falls naturally into
a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind, and builds himself up in a
conception of life which expects to-morrow to be after the pattern of
to-day and yesterday. He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his
friends and acquaintances under the influence of love. He may sometimes
look forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible expectation. But
it is a subject which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will
help the philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly
thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of
the person's experience. I remember an anecdote of a well-known French
theorist, who was debating a point eagerly in his _cenacle_. It was
objected against him that he had never experienced love. Whereupon he
arose, left the society, and made it a point not to return to it until
he considered that he had supplied the defect. "Now," he remarked, on
entering, "now I am in a position to continue the discussion." Perhaps
he had not penetrated very deeply into the subject after all; but the
story indicates right thinking, and may serve as an apologue to readers
of this essay.

When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not without something
of the nature of dismay that the man finds himself in such changed
conditions. He has to deal with commanding emotions instead of the easy
dislikes and preferences in which he has hitherto passed his days; and
he recognises capabilities for pain and pleasure of which he had not yet
suspected the existence. Falling in love is the one illogical adventure,
the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our
trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the
cause. Two persons, neither of them it may be, very amiable or very
beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's
eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of
either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They
fall at o