ike
it. A man may land on a strange island, and abandon the journey on which
he set out, and the home he set out from, to live there for ever. But
there his soul has just sunk to sleep. It hasn't been changed. But love
changes people. I've seen the dirtiest little greasers clean themselves
up and become capable of decency and courage, because there was some
woman about. And oh, my darling! that happened with quite ordinary
women. _Vin Ordinaire._ Pieces cut from the roll of ordinary female
stuff. But how will the magic word act when you are part of the
spell--you who are the most wonderful thing in the whole world, who are
the flower of the earth's crop of beauty, who have such a genius for
just being! Oh, it will be a tremendous thing."

He paused, marvelling at his own exultation, which marked, he knew, so
great a change in him. For always before it had been his chief care that
nothing at all should happen to him emotionally, and especially had he
feared this alchemy of passion. He had been unable to pray for purity,
since he felt it an ideal ridiculously not indigenous to this
richly-coloured three-dimensional universe, and he had observed that it
made men liable to infatuations in later life; but he had prayed for
lust, which he knew to be the most drastic preventive of love. But it
had evaded him as virtue evades other men. Never had he been able to
look on women with the single eye of desire; always in the middle of
his lust, like the dark stamen in a bright flower, there appeared his
inveterate concern for people's souls. Every woman to whom he wanted to
make love was certain to be engaged in some defensive struggle against
fate, for that is the condition of strong personality, and his quick
sense would soon detect its nature; and since there is nothing more
lovable than the sight of a soul standing up against fate, looking so
little under the dome of the indifferent sky, he would find himself
nearly in love. And because that meant, as he had observed, this magic
change of the self, he would turn his back on the adventure, for all his
life he had disliked profound emotional processes with exactly the same
revulsion that a decent man feels for some operation which, though
within the law, is outside the dictates of honesty. He knew there was no
reason that could be formulated why he should not become a real lover;
but nevertheless he had always felt as if for him it would be an act of
disloyalty to some fair standa