nother, less glorious,
but often more efficacious, through surprised sense and premonitions of
pleasure; a third through social sympathy and moral affinities.
Contemplation, sense, and association are none of them the essence nor
even the seed of love; but any of them may be its soil and supply it
with a propitious background. It would be mere sophistry to pretend, for
instance, that love is or should be nothing but a moral bond, the
sympathy of two kindred spirits or the union of two lives. For such an
effect no passion would be needed, as none is needed to perceive beauty
or to feel pleasure.

What Aristotle calls friendships of utility, pleasure, or virtue, all
resting on common interests of some impersonal sort, are far from
possessing the quality of love, its thrill, flutter, and absolute sway
over happiness and misery. But it may well fall to such influences to
awaken or feed the passion where it actually arises. Whatever
circumstances pave the way, love does not itself appear until a sexual
affinity is declared. When a woman, for instance, contemplating
marriage, asks herself whether she really loves her suitor or merely
accepts him, the test is the possibility of awakening a sexual affinity.
For this reason women of the world often love their husbands more truly
than they did their lovers, because marriage has evoked an elementary
feeling which before lay smothered under a heap of coquetries,
vanities, and conventions.

[Sidenote: Subjectivity of the passion.]

Man, on the contrary, is polygamous by instinct, although often kept
faithful by habit no less than by duty. If his fancy is left free, it is
apt to wander. We observe this in romantic passion no less than in a
life of mere gallantry and pleasure. Sentimental illusions may become a
habit, and the shorter the dream is the more often it is repeated, so
that any susceptible poet may find that he, like Alfred de Musset, "must
love incessantly, who once has loved." Love is indeed much less exacting
than it thinks itself. Nine-tenths of its cause are in the lover, for
one-tenth that may be in the object. Were the latter not accidentally at
hand, an almost identical passion would probably have been felt for
someone else; for although with acquaintance the quality of an
attachment naturally adapts itself to the person loved, and makes that
person its standard and ideal, the first assault and mysterious glow of
the passion is much the same for every object. Wha