"Love," said his lordship, laying down his fishing rod, "love, from the philosophically materialistic standpoint, is an unease, a disquiet of the mind, fostered in the male by hallucination, and in the female by determined self-delusion." "Sir," said I, "your meaning is somewhat involved, I would beg you to be a little more explicit." "Then pray observe me, Peregrine! An ordinary young man falls in love with an ordinary young woman because, for some inexplicable reason, she appears to him a mystery, bewitchingly incomprehensible. Suffering under this strange hallucination, he wooes, whereupon our ordinary young woman, shutting her eyes to the ordinariness of our very ordinary young man, now deliberately deludes herself into the firm belief that he is the virile presentment of her own impossible, oft-dreamed ideal. So they are wed (to the infinite wonder of their relations) and hence the perpetuation of the species." "My lord, you grow a little cynical, I think," said I, "surely Love has dowered these apparently so ordinary people with a vision to behold in each other virtues and beauties undreamed of by the world in general. Surely Love possesses the only seeing eye?" "The Greeks thought differently, Peregrine, or wherefore their blindfolded Eros?" "Sir, the mind of man has soared since those far times, I venture to think?" "Perhaps!" said his lordship, shaking his head. "But love between man and woman is much the same, a power to ennoble or debase, angel of light or demon of hell, a thing befouled and shamed by brutish selfishness or glorified by sacrifice. Yes, love is to-day as it was when mighty Babylon worshipped Bel. Yesterday, to-day and for ever, love was, is, and will be the same--the call of nature coming to each of us through the senses to the soul for evil or for good." "But, my lord," said I, stirred beyond myself, "ah, sir, be love what it may--no two ever loved as Diana and I, so truly, so deeply--" "O my lovely, loving lover--O sublime egoist!" exclaimed my companion. "How many other lovers through the ages have thought and said and written the very same? 'Others may have loved mayhap, But never, oh, never as thou and I.' "This is the song of all the amorists of all the ages. Man has been saying this since ever he was man. Here is love's universal, deathless song, written or sung to-day and by lovers long, long forgotten, 'Whoever loved like thou and I, No lovers ever loved as we!'" "Nor did they, sir!" I maintained doggedly. "My love for Diana is a thing wholly apart, an inspiration to all things good and great." "Then prove this, my egoist, prove it!" "But sir--sir," I stammered, nonplussed by his words and the piercing look that accompanied them, "how--in what manner would you have me do this?" "By forgetting yourself in your love for her! By foregoing awhile your present joys for her future good. Give her into my care for two years." "My lord!" I exclaimed aghast. "I--indeed I do not understand."