“Why do you pretend not to admire Laura Courtenay, and why do you give your shoulders that depreciating shrug when you talk of Lady Sylvester?” she would exclaim, with suppressed anger. “Do you think I am deceived by that kind of thing? You dined at the Sylvesters’ four times last season; and you are always dancing attendance upon those Courtenay girls, though you make quite a favour of coming here once a week. I shall ask Laura and Julia Courtenay to stay with me next summer, and then perhaps I shall be honoured by your society.” Of course Mr. Desmond did his uttermost to satisfy the lady’s doubts and cheer her spirits; but he found it not a little wearisome to repeat the same protestations, the same assurances, week after week, to very small effect. “If I could see Emily contented and happy,” he said to himself, “I should be the last to count the cost of our friendship; but her tears, and misgivings, and accusations harass and worry me almost beyond endurance.” Nor did Mr. Desmond feel thus without justification. The lady’s jealousy might, indeed, be the strongest possible evidence of her affection, but it was an evidence which Laurence Desmond could have gladly dispensed with. “Surely there must be within the limits of possibility a love that means peace, trust, unselfishness. Is every woman like Emily, exacting, suspicious, insatiable of devotion and protestation, for ever on the watch to discover falsehood and hypocrisy in the man who loves her? Poor girl! I am hard and cruel perhaps, when I blame her. These doubts and suspicions may be some of the penalties of our position. There can be no true union of hearts where there is a separation of existences. It is all very well to talk sentimental balderdash about the union of souls, the sympathy of minds that think alike, the sighs that are wafted from Indus to the Pole; but, in spite of poetry and metaphysics, real union means the family breakfast-table, the daily dinner, the constitutional walk, the drowsy home-evening when there are no visitors, the summer trip to Switzerland, the quiet, half-tearful talk in the big, darkened bedroom when first the faint squeal of babyhood is heard in the family mansion. Out upon Platonic friendship between men and women who have once knelt together at the shrine of Venus! It is a delusion, a mockery, a lie! There is no union except marriage.”