ies away. He cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point
of this importance; and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.

He discovers a great reluctance to return on former periods of his life.
To all that has not been shared with her, rights and duties, bygone
fortunes and dispositions, he can look back only by a difficult and
repugnant effort of the will. That he should have wasted some years in
ignorance of what alone was really important, that he may have
entertained the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is
a burthen almost too heavy for his self-respect. But it is the thought
of another past that rankles in his spirit like a poisoned wound. That
he himself made a fashion of being alive in the bald, beggarly days
before a certain meeting, is deplorable enough in all good conscience.
But that She should have permitted herself the same liberty seems
inconsistent with a Divine providence.

A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that it is an
artificial feeling, as well as practically inconvenient. This is
scarcely fair; for the feeling on which it merely attends, like an
ill-humoured courtier, is itself artificial in exactly the same sense
and to the same degree. I suppose what is meant by that objection is
that jealousy has not always been a character of man; formed no part of
that very modest kit of sentiments with which he is supposed to have
begun the world; but waited to make its appearance in better days and
among richer natures. And this is equally true of love, and friendship,
and love of country, and delight in what they call the beauties of
nature, and most other things worth having. Love, in particular, will
not endure any historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it
is one of the most incontestable facts in the world; but if you begin to
ask what it was in other periods and countries, in Greece, for instance,
the strangest doubts begin to spring up, and everything seems so vague
and changing that a dream is logical in comparison. Jealousy, at any
rate, is one of the consequences of love; you may like it or not, at
pleasure; but there it is.

It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we reflect on the
past of those we love. A bundle of letters found after years of happy
union creates no sense of insecurity in the present; and yet it will
pain a man sharply. The two people entertain no vulgar doubt of each
other: but this pre-existenc