. They weep through rage, but sorrow they know not. Similarly,
they cannot laugh for joy. Laughing with them is an expression of
pleasure, but not of joy. Here then, at least, we have the better of
them. I for one would not exchange my privilege of pity or my
consolation of pure sorrow for all their transcendent faculty.

It is often said that fairies of both sexes seek our kind because we
know more of the pleasure of love than they do. Since we know more of
the griefs of it that is likely to be true; but it is a great mistake
to suppose that they are unsusceptible to the great heights and deeps
of the holy passion. It is to make the vulgar confusion between the
passion and the expression of it. They are capable of the greatest
devotion to the beloved, of the greatest sacrifice of all--the
sacrifice of their own nature. These fairy-wives of whom I have been
speaking--Miranda King, Mabilla By-the-Wood--when they took upon them
our nature, and with it our power of backward-looking and
forward-peering, was what they could remember, was what they must
dread, no sacrifice? They could have escaped at any moment, mind you,
and been free.[11] Resuming their first nature they would have lost
regret. But they did not. Love was their master. There are many cases
of the kind. With men it is otherwise. I have mentioned Mary Wellwood,
the carpenter's wife, twice taken by a fairy and twice recaptured. The
last time she was brought back to Ashby-de-la-Zouche she died there.
But there is reason for this. A woman marrying a male fairy gets
some, but not all, of the fairy attributes, while her children have
them in full at birth. She bears them with all the signs of human
motherhood, and directly they are born her earthly rights and duties
cease. She does not nurse them and she can only rise in the air when
they are with her. That means that she cannot go after them if they
are long away from her, unless she can get another fairy to keep her
company. By the same mysterious law she can only conceal herself, or
doff her appearance, with the aid of a fairy. For some time after her
abduction or surrender her husband has to nourish her by breathing
into her mouth; but with the birth of her first child she can support
herself in the fairy manner. It was owing to this imperfect state of
being that Mary Wellwood was resumed by her friends the first time.
The second time she went back of her own accord.

[Footnote 11: When a fairy marries a man s