The most misleading of illusions are, however, those which are fostered by the actions love produces; for it is not these which determine the quality of a personality. While love is fighting for its happiness it may transform an ordinary person into something higher than himself, as also into something lower. When the tension is relieved, it is seen that in the former case—especially as regards men—love was able to ... unmake him from a common man But not complete him to an uncommon one.... It was no organic growth of the personality, but only a straining of self that love called forth. But she who loved him will watch till her eyes are weary for what she has seen but once! Those who have loved them deeply learn from these, in one way or another, inadequate persons the most dearly-bought truth in the knowledge of human nature, a truth that the heart acknowledges last of all: that even if we poured out our own blood in streams for any one—we could not thereby give him a drop of richer or more noble blood than is found in his own heart. Many have learned this secret in that kind of marriage, where secure friendship and faithful comradeship abounded; just those feelings, in fact, which are recommended as the infallible remedy for love’s mistakes. How often has not one of these married people active for and with the other, found out that they never bring their mate into spiritual activity, that the soul of one has never reached the soul of the other? Outside observers think them suited like “hand in glove.” The image is significant, for a glove is empty and meaningless when it does not enclose a hand. But like hand to hand they are not suited! Therefore it not unfrequently occurs that some day one of them is seized by a passionate longing to meet with another hand, which shall be strongly and quietly grasped in his own and thus double its power; that the voice, which has continually spoken into empty space—whence a faithful echo has unfailingly answered—will finally be dumb from the longing to receive an answer from another voice, in words that were never heard before. Not a few marriages include men who have had such fine thoughts, dreamed such fair dreams of woman, that they have desired to win her senses only through her soul and have disdained to offer her other than their best, the richest treasures of their personality. But perhaps such a man has a wife who understands only money-making and desires only the pleasures of love. If he offers all the glories of his soul, she does not even suspect when a mood is at its height; for her silence is never eloquent; she is incapable of waiting for another’s thought; has no patience with what is difficult of comprehension, and will always receive the unusual with dull misunderstanding or gay superiority.