The writer of the "Confessions" then goes on to speak of love, and of the woman he loves; but as his concluding paragraph will sufficiently serve to give an idea of his thoughts on the subject, it is hardly necessary to quote the passage in full. "Yes, I love her, I love her truly, and she too loves me, or will. It is not blind love, or foolish idolatry. She knows all my faults--the pitiful paltriness of my life, the selfish acts and foolish words, the vanity and the vice--she knows them all, and yet she loves me, me, not them, but the true me which these faults cannot altogether conceal from her, for she knows that they are not my life, but the trouble of it. So also is my love for her. I love her not only for her present self, but for the sake of the self she is seeking to be--the self which in some measure indeed she now is; for that which in our truer moments we have striven to be; the Ideal upon which our eyes are ever fixed, to which (no matter how sorely we may have sinned against it in the struggle of the day) our thoughts return at night with but the more unutterable if despairing longing and love--_that_ in some manner we are, and shall be, notwithstanding our ever-recurrent failure and sin. "I do not ask or expect that she shall be always true to her high ideal, for I know that to none of us is it given to walk with unfaltering feet. I remember, too, that she is no angel, but a woman with womanly weakness and human faults, for all of which I am touched with true and tender sympathy, to love her not the less, but the more. But that she should _have_ such an ideal, and be capable of such an aim--for that reason, if for no other, I must love and honour her with the deepest love and honour of my soul. I am not so blind as to suppose it will be all summer and sunshine in the life which she and I will, I hope, one day lead together. I know my own evil nature too well not to be aware that there will be times when she will find it hard to prevent love being turned into loathing and confidence into contempt; and I think, with sinking of spirit, of the sore disappointment she will feel when she finds what a shabby-souled common-place creature her husband is, compared with the being into whom her love had idealized him. At such times of despondency, however, I try to remember what Miss Muloch has said about wedded life--and who has written more helpful words than she? 'I would have every woman marry,' she says, 'not merely liking a man well enough to accept him as a husband, but loving him so wholly that, wedded or not, she feels she is at heart his wife, and none other's, to the end of her life. So faithful that she can see all his little faults (though she takes care no one else shall see them), yet would as soon think of loving him the less for these, as of ceasing to look up to heaven because there are a few clouds in the sky. So true and so fond that she needs neither to vex him with her constancy nor