For the younger, in the richest sense of the word, a person is, the more certainly does he possess the poet’s gift which transforms reality according to his dreams. The fine curve of a pair of lips renews the marvel of the legend: that every frog that jumps over them is changed into a rose. Even if a dim suspicion awakes, when every serious thought or intimate feeling is met by empty silence or equally empty loquacity, the imagination easily convinces the instinct that silence means “profundity of intelligence,” or speech “candour.” At every age, but especially at this, love is a great superstition. Secure as sleep-walkers in the presence of danger, its votaries fling themselves into a decision. And it is this simple rashness of innocence that the current conception of morality subjects to a lifelong punishment. The cautious ones, on the other hand, often find in time the great rewards—thanks to their own smaller value. More things happen in a human life than marriage and finally death. Much may happen in a human soul between marriage and death. The current assumption that everything which separates a person from the partner in matrimony is evil and ought to be overcome; everything which binds him to her good and ought to be encouraged—this is part of the wisdom which reduces life to the simplest terms, which is cheap and therefore most in use; for a higher wisdom demands a higher price. Nothing is commoner, especially for the woman whose first experience of love is in marriage, than that she is in love with love and not her husband. Sometimes woman is betrayed by her senses, but more often by the morning dew of sensibility, which youth and love spread over even the driest of men’s souls,—a dew which disappears with the morning. Another illusion, which in these days of intercommunication causes many mistakes in love, is the peculiarity of a foreign nationality, which has the effect of a personal originality—until it gradually betrays itself as only another kind of conformity than that one is used to. In other cases again, the husband is all she sees in him. But a young woman herself often goes through, during the years from twenty to twenty-five, so complete a transformation of feelings and ways of thought, that after a few years of marriage she finds herself in the presence of a man who is a perfect stranger to her. This period of illusions in first youth is answered by another towards the close of youth. If a woman has not before experienced love, this is the psychological moment at which almost every illusion is possible. Her now universal demands of love, the longing of her mature woman’s nature, have countless times made a noble creature cast these pearls—if not exactly as described in the biblical image—at least into an empty space where they have just as surely been unappreciated. On man’s side, there are other or corresponding possibilities that early marriage may be founded on self-deception.