“What a lunatic you must think me after this rhapsody! What! you will say, does the man really mean that he wouldn’t exchange the recollection of a moment for the living, material presence of the woman concerned? Well, it is very natural that you should think me a lunatic, but have patience; take into consideration my life, which has been lived, as you know, alone; always in unusual places, with no one near my heart. Living, material presences come to have comparatively little significance after twenty or thirty years of solitude. Try it, and you will see. One drifts into a more visionary world, peopled by shadowy and ideal forms; memories assume incredible proportions and acquire an unbelievable value; one browses off them like a camel off his hump. Do you begin to understand now that this great, shining, resplendent moment should rush in to fill a mind so dependent on the life unreal? One must have something, you see, and if one can’t have human love one must fall back upon imagination. Hence the romantic souls of spinsters.... “And hence, I might say, a great many other things which practical men barely acknowledge. I find myself straying off down paths of thought which may lead me into swamps of digression. Hence religion, hence poetry, hence art, hence love itself—the spiritual side of love. All these things, unpractical, inconvenient, unimportant things, all sprung from a craving in man’s nature! A craving for what? Hasn’t he been given strength, health, bodily well-being, hunger and thirst, fellow-men to fight, and fists to fight them with? What more does the creature want? He wants a thing called Beauty, but what it is he can’t tell you, and what he wants to do with it when he’s got it he can’t tell you; but he wants it. Something that he calls his soul wants it. A desire to worship.... Beauty, a purely arbitrary thing. All men strive after it, some men so little that they are themselves unconscious of the desire, other men so passionately that they give up their whole lives to its pursuit; and all the graded differences come in between.