is that
this order of beings walks abroad, and I am not of it, and I meet it,
and I am pained, and I feel sorry. Could Love be but a pleasing fiction,
how comfortable to sit aside and contemplate it--a trifle to talk of, a
dainty to dally with, a joy to the juvenescent, a blessing to the
book-writer, yet never an inconvenience. But it is a practical reality,
and it has great effects. Why, I have seen good, healthy people, quite
nice-tempered people, brought to a shadow by it and churned into so many
pounds of incompetent irritability; _so_ exacting about trifles, so
fidgetty about catching the mail, and so careless of the health of the
uninteresting majority. There was one man I knew down in a village, and
he fell in love with a pretty girl--they mostly do that--but she would
have nothing to say to him; and after every rejected proposal he went
straight home and made a three-legged stool (he was a carpenter by
trade, or perhaps it might have affected him differently). He was what
one might call an importunate man, for he proposed nineteen times in
all, and nineteen three-legged stools stood as silent witnesses of his
importunity. He changed houses after the twelfth, for he found a sad joy
in contemplating his handiwork as he sat at his lonely meals, and his
first sitting-room was only twelve feet by eight. Finally, either
because of his importunity, or because she disliked the thought that the
wordless witnesses might fall into unsympathetic hands, the girl married
the man, and scrubbed the stools nicely with soap and sand, and grew
quite fond of them. And only once did she regret her surrender; and that
was when it flashed across her one day that twenty would have been a
prettier number: but she stifled that pain as years went on, and grew
happy. Then there was Dante's love for Beatrice, which caused him to sit
down and write such a lot. Most remarkable persons seem to have produced
something rather excellent as the outcome of their love. I know a
naturally lazy and slightly dingy boy who endured a nice clean collar
every day, and it cut his neck, and his soul abhorred it, for he told me
so; and he spent from seventy-five to ninety minutes over his toilet
every morning, while he loved, and he knew he could dress in four
minutes and a quarter, for he had done it often. Love was a great
beautifier. In this case I must admit that the lover suffered more than
we outsiders, except that he became irritable in his cleanliness.