ncontrovertible possession of the sacred heart. Nor has Narcissus been
the only lover, I suspect, who, in the season of the waning of the moon,
has sent such excuses for scrappy epistolary make-shifts as 'the
strident din of an office, an air so cruelly unsympathetic, as frost to
buds, to the blossoming of all those words of love that press for
birth,' when, as a matter of fact, he has been unblushingly eating the
lotus, in the laziest chair at home, in the quietest night of summer.
Such insincerity is a common besetting sin of the young male;
invariably, I almost think, if he has the artistic temperament. Yet I do
not think it presents itself to his mind in its nudity, but comes
clothed with that sophistry in which youth, the most thoroughgoing of
_philosophes_, is so ingenious. Consideration for the beloved object, it
is called--yes! beloved indeed, though, such is the paradox in the order
of things, but one of the several vestals of the sacred fire. One cannot
help occasional disinclination on a lazy evening, confound it! but it
makes one twinge to think of paining her with such a confession; and a
story of that sort--well, it's a lie, of course; but it's one without
any harm, any seed of potential ill, in it. So the letter goes, maybe to
take its place as the 150th of the sacred writings, and make poor
Daffodilia, who has loved to count the growing score, happy with the
completion of the half-century.

But the disinclination goes not, though the poor passion has, of
course, its occasional leapings in the socket, and the pain has to come
at last, for all that dainty consideration, which, moreover, has been
all the time feeding larger capacities for suffering. For, of course, no
man thinks of marrying his twelfth love, though in the thirteenth there
is usually danger; and he who has jilted, so to say, an earl's daughter
as his sixth, may come to see

'The God of Love, ah! benedicite,
How mighty and how great a lord is he'

in the thirteenth Miss Simpkins.

But this is to write as an outsider: for that thirteenth, by a mystical
process which has given to each of its series in its day the same primal
quality, is, of course, not only the last, but the first. And, indeed,
with little casuistry, that thirteenth may be truly held to be the
first, for it is a fact determined not so much by the chosen maid as by
him who chooses, though he himself is persuaded quite otherwise. To him
his amorous career has been hithert