polygamist, and the blood rushed to my
head in a sudden surge. I leaned back as the horses started at the crack
of the whip. I felt sick and humiliatingly impotent. I saw Love and
Romance for what they are in this iron world of ours--ragged outcasts
shivering in the streets, the abject dependents of the rich. And I saw
myself for what I was, too, for the matter of that, a reed shaken by the
winds of desire, an emotional somnambulist terrified at the apparition
of his own destiny."

* * * * *

"No," said Mr. Spenlove in reply to a murmured protest, "I am not
libelling humanity at all. We are a very fine lot of fellows, no doubt.
As I mentioned a little while ago, the new generation seem to be a
distinct advance in evolutionary types over us older and more imperfect
organisms. To watch a modern youth with a woman, to hear him recount his
extensive and peculiar experiences with women, to study his detached and
factory-built emotions toward women--the outcome of our modern craze for
quantity-production, is an instructive and somewhat alarming pastime for
one weathering middle age. An improvement, of course. All progress means
that, I am informed. But I am not telling you the adventures of a
super-man, only a super in the play. What? No, I didn't run down love,
as you call it, at all. My quarrel was not with love, or even the sexual
manifestation of it which pre-occupies you all so much. I simply doubted
your knowledge of it. I suggested that the majority of men never know
very much about it save in a scared and furtive fashion. I hinted that
you never fully realized the terrific importance of romantic ideas in
the world; that you make a joke of the whole business, filling your
rooms with pictures of well-nourished young women in amorous poses,
filling your minds with mocking travesties and sly anecdotes of those
great souls who have left us the records of their emotional storms and
ship-wrecks. I am telling you the story of Captain Macedoine's
daughter. Eh? Well, I am coming to that ... it seems we shall be here
till morning.

"It once occurred to me," he went on, meditatively, "that a good deal of
the unreality of people in books is due to the homogeneity of their
emotions. A man in love, for example, is in love right to the end, or to
the point where the mechanism of the story renders it necessary to
introduce another state of affairs. Anybody who has been in love, or
cherished a hatred,