d woman's understanding, and it may be surmised that even man
does not fully realise it until he is old and grey.

[Sidenote: The Cords of Memory]

Yet somewhere, in every man's heart, is hidden a woman's face. To that
inner chamber no other image ever finds its way. The cords of memory
which hold it are strong as steel and as tender as the heart-fibre of
which they are made.

There is no time in his life when those eyes would not thrill him and
those lips make him tremble--no hour when the sound of that voice would
not summon him like a trumpet-call.

No loyalty or allegiance is powerful enough to smother it within his own
heart, in spite of the conditions to which he may outwardly conform.
Other passions may temporarily hide it even from his own sight, yet in
reality it is supreme, from the day of its birth to the door of his
grave.

He may be happily married, as the world counts happiness, and She may be
dead--but never forgotten. No real love or hate is wrought upon by
Lethe. The thousand dreams of her will send his blood in passionate flow
and the thousand memories of her whiten his face with pain. Friendship
is intermittent and passion forgets, but man's single love is eternal.

Because woman's love is responsive, it never dies. Her love of love is
everlasting. Some threads in the fabric she has woven are like shining
silver; others are sombre, broken, and stained with tears. When a man
has once taught a woman to believe his love is true, she is already,
though unconsciously, won.

All the beauty in woman's life is forever associated with her love.
Violets bring the memory of dead days, when the boy-lover brought them
to her in fragrant heaps. Some women say man's love is selfish, but
there is no one among them who has ever been loved by a boy.

[Sidenote: Some Lost Song]

Broken, hesitant chords set some lost song to singing in her heart. The
break in her lover's voice is like another, long ago. Summer days and
summer fields, silver streams, and clouds of apple blossoms set against
the turquoise sky, bring back the Mays of childhood and all the childish
dreams.

This is another thing a man cannot understand--that every little
tenderness of his wakes the memory of all past tenderness, and for that
very reason is often doubly sweet. This is the explanation of sudden
sadness, of the swift succession of moods, and of lips, shut on sobs,
that sometimes quiver beneath his own.

Woman keeps alive the old i