To this must be added that the increased sensibility of modern man has rendered him more and more inclined to wear masks, protective disguises, artistically decorated armour. Protection is indispensable, since no one would be able to endure life if he were hourly seeing the ill-bound or still open wounds of others, or feeling his own touched by anyone. Existence would lose much of its excitement without secrets, suspected or unsuspected, in the destinies and souls of men. But at the same time this protection renders love’s struggle to penetrate appearances more and more difficult. Therefore a certain form of “flirtation” serves as the attempt of awakening love to tear off the mask, to outwit the protective disguise, a game of fence which aims at the joints of the tight-fitting armour. But the attempts are often unsuccessful and life is more and more crowded with destinies that have miscarried, while more and more people wring their hands in solitude over what might have been! Man feels more deeply than ever before that life gave him a poor portion, when his love has been nothing but sinking in an embrace. An ever greater number know that love is absorption into that spirit, in which one’s own finds its foothold without losing its freedom; the nearness of that heart which stills the disquiet in our own; that attentive ear which catches what is unspoken and unspeakable; the clear sight of those eyes which see the realisation of our best possibilities; the touch of those hands which, dying, we would feel closed on our own. When two souls have joys which the senses share, and when the senses have delights which the souls ennoble, then the result is neither desire nor friendship. Both have been absorbed in a new feeling, not to be compared with either taken by itself, just as the air is incomparable with its component elements. Nitrogen is not air, nor is oxygen; sensuousness is not love, nor is sympathy. In combination they are the air of life and love. If either of the component elements is in the wrong proportion to the other, then love—like air—becomes too heavy or too rarefied. But as the proportions between oxygen and nitrogen may within a wide limit vary without disadvantage, so also may the components of love. Affinity of soul is doubtless the most enduring element in love, but not therefore the only valuable one; the love that fills life with intoxication is separated from even the most lofty friendship by an ocean as deep as that which divides the India of legend from utilitarian America—a lifetime in which will not equal a single day in the other! Great love arises only when desire of a being of the other sex coalesces with the longing for a soul of one’s own kind. It is like fire, the hotter it is, the purer; and differs from the ardour of desire as the white heat of a smelting-furnace differs from the ruddy, smoking flames of a torch carried along the streets.