time smiling to herself with faint amusement. "Do you
really disapprove of love, Uncle Sim?" she asked, at last.

He yawned loudly and stretched himself. "What 'd be the good of that?
Don't disapprove of it any more than I disapprove of the circulation of
the blood. Force in life--of course! Treasure to be valued and peril to
be controlled. To play with it requires skill; to utilize it calls for
wisdom."

She had again been smiling gently to herself when she said, "I doubt if
_you_ can ever have been in love."

"Got nothing to do with it. Not obliged to have been insane to
understand insanity. As a matter of fact, best brain specialists have
always kept their senses."

"Oh, then, you rate love with insanity."

"Depends on the kind. Some sorts not far from it. Obsession.
Brain-storm. Supernormal excitement. Passing commotion of the senses.
Comes as suddenly as a summer tempest--thunder and lightning and
rain--and goes the same way."

"Oh, but would you call that love?"

"You bet I'd call it love. Love the poets write about. Grand passion.
Whirls along like a tornado--makes a noise and kicks up dust--and all
over in an afternoon. That's the real thing. If you can't love like
that, you can't love at all--not in the grand manner. The going just as
vital as the coming. Very essence of it that it shouldn't last. That's
why Shakespeare kills his Romeo and his Juliet at the end of the
play--and Wagner his Tristan and his Isolde. Nothing else to do with
'em. People of that kind go through just the same set of high jinks six
or eight months later with some one else; and in poetry that wouldn't
do. Romantic lovers love by crises, and never pass twice the same way.
People who don't do that--and lots of 'em don't--needn't think they can
be romantic. They ain't."

"But surely there _is_ a love--"

"Of the nice, tame, house-keeping variety. Of course! And it bears the
same relation to the other kind as a glass of milk to a bottle of
champagne. Mind you, I like milk. I approve of it. In the long run it
'll beat champagne any day--especially where you expect babies. I'm only
saying that it doesn't come of the same vintage as Veuve Cliquot. Women
often wish it did; and when it doesn't they make things uncomfortable.
No use. Can't make a Tristan out of good, honest, faithful William
Dobbin, nohow. The thing with the fizz is bound to go flat; and the
thing that stands by you, to be relied on all through life, won't have
any fiz