For loving is a healing medicine even for the wounds love gives. Only one thing a loving person cannot bear, to see the dear ones suffer. To take one’s self silently away in order to spare them pain is within the power of great love. And this does not mean a tame resignation watering the red stream of the blood. It means that love has become so great that it takes seriously the great words so lightly uttered in happiness, that torments caused by the beloved were dearer than joys given by others. When love has become the power in which a person lives and moves and has his being, the words of the _Epistle to the Corinthians_ on love are fulfilled in a more beautiful way than Paul dreamed of. Great love does not only love for the sake of loving; it attains the incredible: to love the loved one more than one’s own feeling. If it were a question of thus providing for the other a more perfect happiness, this love would be able to quench its own flame and with it the fulness of pain and of joy that life had gained from this feeling. Women sometimes make such a sacrifice. Here and there a man has been capable of it. But he who has attained to this height of emotion lives so wonderful a life that the happiness the united couple create for each other must be extraordinarily great if these two rich ones are not in reality to be the poorer. When the thought has once become inherent in mankind that no one can be happy without the feeling that he is making others happy; that only the highest development of one’s own feeling is imperishable happiness; that all other happiness is charity, not justice—then there will be fewer torn asunder, even if there be no more happy ones. But love is still such, men, women, and the people around them are still such, that one would rather wish a tied man or woman strength to endure marriage than to break it, at least if they have children who must share with them the unknown fortunes of their love. Before these, if ever, one feels the meaning of the Breton fisher’s song: ... la mer est grande et ma barque est petite ... How often has not the little boat, fraught with life’s last riches, been lost on the wide sea? But therefore it is that no one there seeks his pleasure, but only his life. That our actions in the erotic sphere—as in every other—must call forth the criticism of others is just as unavoidable as that our figure should be reflected in a mirror as we pass. But public opinion is a convex mirror, a globe swollen by prejudice, which distorts the image. Only a clear and calm soul gives a true picture of another’s actions.