It is true, certainly, that the _nature_ of love and passion may change with time and the comradeship of daily life; but the change is not a weakening, not even a lowering of the pulse. Its ardour does not diminish but conquers life more completely. It is, actually, the constant and faithful heart, which has most strength to bear with, or to ennoble, the deadening trivialities of existence (that no free lover can escape), to make small things great; which finds most courage to face Fate. The deadening influence of constant "experiments" in passion ("walking round and round the thing you want, gloating over it with your eyes"); the bitter tragedy of a life that is "one long series of eager conquests turned to listless ones," has been dramatically exposed, with unflinching realism, by Miss Olive Mary Salter in her _God's Wages_; which also reveals "that love beyond self which is human companionship." For Anne Verity, we read, "marriage" had been "the finger-post to Death." In "making man her own she made him stale. . . . There was no end to those upon whom she had lived and left them to pay the bill." Always "life must be savoured anew by fresh interests, hashed up aspects of the same old facts served up over and over again to one's easily deceived palate." It was "her vanity that must be ministered to afresh, its staleness and satiation relieved by the sacrifice of someone else's young virility." She found that "love doesn't stay with this generation, it touches us and flies again. . . . It's this awful quality of inconstancy in me, as if my heart had got a hole in it. . . . We've lost the art of looking on at anybody but ourselves." But, at long last, when a man explained to her: "I want you to love my mind, that lives, instead of my body, that will die," she awoke. She learnt then, that "the right man, or the right woman for the matter of that, isn't ever ready made. It needs effort of the most intense kind to fit a man perfectly into a woman's life, a woman perfectly into a man's." _Wherefore, "Love, real love, is the consummation of great effort, neither more nor less."_ IX WHO _IS_ THE "IDEAL" MISTRESS? The most determined advocates of free-love have never upheld the old, lazy indulgence towards man and his "wild oats." The ideal mistress, whom they so confidently exalt over the wife, is not the "kept woman" behind Victorian respectability. Modern writers have, boldly and justly, attacked that discreet indiscretion with the unanswerable logic of facts. If we allow men licence, justice demands equal liberty for women. Sin is not less, but greater, for being in secret, however flimsy the veil.