ld be worse than useless. Its
indulgence would work no end of disturbance to the community at large,
beside entailing much misery upon its individual victim. Its exercise
would probably be classed with kleptomania and other like excesses of
purely personal consideration. The community could never permit the
practice, for it strikes at the very root of their whole social system.

The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of the
omission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with us,
spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the warp of
man's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect of the loss
upon the individuality of the person himself is what concerns us now.

If there is one moment in a man's life when his interest for the world
at large pales before the engrossing character of his own emotions, it
is assuredly when that man first falls in love. Then, if never before,
the world within excludes the world without. For of all our human
passions none is so isolating as the tenderest. To shut that one other
being in, we must of necessity shut all the rest of mankind out; and we
do so with a reckless trust in our own self-sufficiency which has about
it a touch of the sublime. The other millions are as though they were
not, and we two are alone in the earth, which suddenly seems to have
grown unprecedentedly beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judicious
depopulation to make of any spot an Eden. Perhaps the early Jewish
myth-makers had some such thought in mind when they wrote their idyl of
the cosmogony. The human traits are true to-day. Then at last our souls
throw aside their conventional wrappings to stand revealed as they
really are. Certain of comprehension, the thoughts we have never dared
breathe to any one before, find a tongue for her who seems fore-destined
to understand. The long-closed floodgates of feeling are thrown wide,
and our personality, pent up from the time of its inception for very
mistrust, sweeps forth in one uncontrollable rush. For then the most
reticent becomes confiding; the most self-contained expands. Then every
detail of our past lives assumes an importance which even we had not
divined. To her we tell them all,--our boyish beliefs, our youthful
fancies, the foolish with the fine, the witty with the wise, the little
with the great. Nothing then seems quite unworthy, as nothing seems
quite worthy enough. Flowers and weeds that w