nds, at least, to
love. It also reaches for the fires that thrill and thaw, whereas you
stand before a cold hearth and think the chill well and welcome, since
you understand its cause. You have grasped part of a truth, and though
my mind complete your arc into the perfection of a circle, I cannot
place it about your head as a halo. My confusion comes from thinking of
you more than of my creed. A pregnant factor in our debate is the
debater. The Hafiz of the Hafiz maxims, the philosopher of your
philosophy happens to interest me. You have been building yourself up
before my eyes, and for watching I cannot speak.

With what does romance interfere? If it implied a waste of vital force,
a giving up, a postponement of life, it were a roundabout path to
development and happiness. But we live most when we are most under its
sway, and it is for such self-promised sparks that we live at all.
Romance quickens and controls as does nothing else, and because of this
it is not only a means but an end in itself. It is stirred-up life. We
live most when we love most. The love of romance and the romance of love
is the only coin for which the heart-hurt sell their death. A trick?
Perhaps. The love of life is a trick to save the races from self-murder.
Nature makes legitimate her tricks. Let the Genius of the Race lure us
with passion and dreaming! We are not the losers by it. And if the dream
fades and we grow gray despite what has been lived, then it is something
to remember that soul and sense have leapt and pulsed. I am thankful
that romance has an aftermath, and that old men and women can prattle
about days that were robust. I am thankful that the soldiers of life are
at the end given a furlough in which to fondle the arms they wielded
with clumsiness and with spirit, and in which to pass themselves in
review before their pension expires and their days are over. Youth has
the romance of loving, and age the romance of remembering.

Lovers are not always compatible, you say, and, before all, you insist
upon good partnership. How will you insure yourself against unfitness?
Surely not by a registering and weighing of qualities, not by bargaining
and speculating. We do not choose our wives as we do our saddle-horses;
we do not plan our marriages as we plan our houses. It may sound
paradoxical, but there is a higher compatibility than that of quality
and degree. It is not whether people can live together, but whether they
should live toge