heard her abusing her mother in the most heartless manner. He did not
ring the bell, and never called again. His love was of the highest
type, but he suppressed his feelings.

More important than the further improvement of romantic love is the
task of increasing the proportion of men and women who will be capable
of experiencing it as now known to us. The vast majority are still
strangers to anything beyond primitive love. The analysis made in the
present volume will enable all persons who fancy themselves in love to
see whether their passion is merely self-love in a roundabout way or
true romantic affection for another. They can see whether it is mere
selfish liking, attachment, or fondness, or else unselfish affection.
If adoration, purity, sympathy, and the altruistic impulses of
gallantry and self-sacrifice are lacking, they can be cultivated by
deliberate exercise:

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this.

The affections can be trained as well as the muscles; and thus the
lesson taught in this book may help to bring about a new era of
unselfish devotion and true love. No man, surely, can read the
foregoing disclosures regarding man's primitive coarseness and
heartlessness without feeling ashamed for his sex and resolving to be
an unselfish lover and husband to the end of his life.

A great mistake was made by the Greeks when they distinguished
celestial from earthly love. The distinction itself was all right, but
their application of it was all wrong. Had they known romantic love as
we know it, they could not have made the grievous blunder of calling
the love between men and women worldly, reserving the word celestial
for the friendship between men. Equally mistaken were those mediaeval
sages who taught that the celestial sexual virtues are celibacy and
virginity--a doctrine which, if adopted, would involve the suicide of
the human race, and thus stands self-condemned. No, _celestial love is
not asceticism; it is altruism_. Romantic love is celestial, for it is
altruistic, yet it does not preach contempt of the body, and its goal
is marriage, the chief pillar of civilization. The admiration of a
beautiful, well-rounded, healthy body is as legitimate and laudable an
ingredient of romantic love as the admiration of that mental beauty
which distinguishes it from sensual love. It is not only that the
lovers themselves