in herself, a new feeling that she could not shake
off. For her, there was now but one man in the world; which is to say
that henceforth she cared to shine for his sake alone.

While the physiologist can define love promptly by following out natural
laws, the moralist finds a far more perplexing problem before him if
he attempts to consider love in all its developments due to social
conditions. Still, in spite of the heresies of the endless sects that
divide the church of Love, there is one broad and trenchant line of
difference in doctrine, a line that all the discussion in the world can
never deflect. A rigid application of this line explains the nature
of the crisis through which the Duchess, like most women, was to pass.
Passion she knew, but she did not love as yet.

Love and passion are two different conditions which poets and men of the
world, philosophers and fools, alike continually confound. Love implies
a give and take, a certainty of bliss that nothing can change; it
means so close a clinging of the heart, and an exchange of happiness so
constant, that there is no room left for jealousy. Then possession is a
means and not an end; unfaithfulness may give pain, but the bond is not
less close; the soul is neither more nor less ardent or troubled, but
happy at every moment; in short, the divine breath of desire spreading
from end to end of the immensity of Time steeps it all for us in the
selfsame hue; life takes the tint of the unclouded heaven. But Passion
is the foreshadowing of Love, and of that Infinite to which all
suffering souls aspire. Passion is a hope that may be cheated. Passion
means both suffering and transition. Passion dies out when hope is
dead. Men and women may pass through this experience many times without
dishonor, for it is so natural to spring towards happiness; but there is
only one love in a lifetime. All discussions of sentiment ever
conducted on paper or by word of mouth may therefore be resumed by
two questions--"Is it passion? Is it love?" So, since love comes into
existence only through the intimate experience of the bliss which gives
it lasting life, the Duchess was beneath the yoke of passion as yet; and
as she knew the fierce tumult, the unconscious calculations, the fevered
cravings, and all that is meant by that word _passion_--she suffered.
Through all the trouble of her soul there rose eddying gusts of tempest,
raised by vanity or self-love, or pride or a high spirit; for al