the charm of memory, to destroy the hopes that survive
a lost lover, precisely because he only awakened longings, and all that
is loveliest and most enchanting in love?"

These sober reflections, due to the discouragement and dread of failure
with which love begins in earnest, were the last expiring effort of
diplomatic reasoning. Thenceforward he knew no afterthoughts, he was the
plaything of his love, and lost himself in the nothings of that strange
inexplicable happiness which is full fed by a chance word, by silence,
or a vague hope. He tried to love Platonically, came daily to breathe
the air that she breathed, became almost a part of her house, and went
everywhere with her, slave as he was of a tyrannous passion compounded
of egoism and devotion of the completest. Love has its own instinct,
finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way
to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay or turn aside. If
feeling is sincere, its destiny is not doubtful. Let a woman begin to
think that her life depends on the sincerity or fervor or earnestness
which her lover shall put into his longings, and is there not sufficient
in the thought to put her through all the tortures of dread? It is
impossible for a woman, be she wife or mother, to be secure from a young
man's love. One thing it is within her power to do--to refuse to see him
as soon as she learns a secret which she never fails to guess. But
this is too decided a step to take at an age when marriage has become a
prosaic and tiresome yoke, and conjugal affection is something less than
tepid (if indeed her husband has not already begun to neglect her). Is a
woman plain? she is flattered by a love which gives her fairness. Is she
young and charming? She is only to be won by a fascination as great
as her own power to charm, that is to say, a fascination well-nigh
irresistible. Is she virtuous? There is a love sublime in its
earthliness which leads her to find something like absolution in the
very greatness of the surrender and glory in a hard struggle. Everything
is a snare. No lesson, therefore, is too severe where the temptation is
so strong. The seclusion in which the Greeks and Orientals kept and keep
their women, an example more and more followed in modern England, is the
only safeguard of domestic morality; but under this system there is
an end of all the charm of social intercourse; and society, and good
breeding, and refinement of manners beco