"Our loves," said John, "are always very strange. Love is the rummest miracle of them all. It is even more difficult to account for than the formation of clouds on the hillside." "We love the things that give us pleasure," said Annunziata. "And the people, sometimes, who give us pain," said John. "We love the people, first of all, who are related to us," said Annunziata, "and then the people we see a great deal of--just as I love, first of all, my uncle, and then you and Marcella the cook." "Who brings in the inevitable veal," said John. "Thank you, Honeymouth." He bowed and laughed, while Annunziata's grave eyes wondered what he was laughing at. "But it isn't every one," he pointed out, "who has your solid and well-balanced little head-piece. It isn't every one who keeps his love so neatly docketed, or so sanely submitted to the sway of reason. Some of us love first of all people who aren't related to us in the remotest degree, and people we've seen hardly anything of and know next to nothing about." Annunziata deprecatingly shook her head. "It is foolish to love people we know nothing about," she declared, in her deep voice, and looked a very sage delivering judgment. "True enough," said John. "But what would you have? Some of us are born to folly, as the sparks fly upward. You see, there's a mighty difference between love and love. There's the love which is affection, there's the love which is cupboard-love, and there's the love which is just simply love-love and nothing else. The first, as you have truly observed, has its roots in consanguinity or association, the second in a lively hope of future comfits, and either is sufficiently explicable. But the third has its roots apparently in mere haphazard and causelessness, and isn't explicable by any means whatsoever, and yet is far and away the violentest of the three. It falls as the lightning from the clouds, and strikes whom it will. Though I mix my metaphors fearlessly, like a man, I trust, with your feminine intuition, you follow me?" "No," said Annunziata, without compunction, her eyes on the distance. "I don't know what you mean."