nt
to share her thoughts, and I want to feel all the great aspirations of
her soul--I want her companionship--I want her sympathy--I want her
understanding.

When I was in love with Nina--and five or six others--I never thought of
any of these things--I just wanted their bodies: Therefore it is only
when the spiritual enters into the damned thing, I suppose, that one
could call it love. By that reasoning I have loved only Alathea in all
my life. But I am stumped with this thought--If she had one eye and no
leg below the knee--should I be in love with her? and feel all these
exalted emotions about her? I cannot honestly be certain how I would
answer that question yet, so this shows that the physical plays the
chief role even in a love that seems spiritual.

Matho--in Flaubert's Salammbo was beaten to a jelly but his eyes still
flamed with love for his princess--But when she saw him as this
revolting mass, did her love flame for him? Or was she exalted only by
the incense to her vanity--and a pity for his sufferings? Heloise and
Abelard were pretty wonderful in their love, but his love became
transmuted much sooner than hers, because all physical emotions were
gone from him. Plato's idea that man gravitates towards beauty for some
subconscious soul desire to re-create himself through perfection, and so
attain immortality, is probably the truth. And that is why we shrink
from mutilated bodies--. Until I can be quite sure that I should love
Alathea just the same were she disfigured as I am--I cannot in justice
expect her to return my passion--.

Nina became re-attracted (if I can coin that word)--because I was out of
reach. The predatory instinct in woman had received a rebuff, and
demanded renewed advance.--She still keeps a picture in some part of
her mental vision of what I was too, therefore, I am not so revolting
to her--but Alathea has not this advantage, and has seen me only
wounded.

I have done nothing to earn her respect--She has apprehended my useless
life in these last months--She has heard the chattering of my
companions, whom I have been free to choose--the obvious deduction being
that these are what I desire--And finally, she knows that I have had a
mistress.--In heaven's name _why_ should she be anything but what she is
in her manner to me!--Of course she despises me. So that the only thing
I could possibly allure her by would be that intangible something which
Nina and Suzette and even Coralie--have in