In that last line lies the explanation of one of the mysteries of modern love--its stubborn fidelity to the beloved after the choice has been made. But there is another mystery of individual preference that calls for an explanation--its capriciousness, apparent or real, in making a choice--that quality which has made the poets declare so often that "love is blind." On this point much confusion of ideas prevails. Matters are simplified if we first dispose of those numerous cases in which the individual preference is only approximate. If a girl of eighteen has the choice between a man of sixty and a youth of twenty, she will, if she exercises a _personal_ preference, take the youth, as a matter of course, though he may be far from her ideal. Such preference is generic rather than individual. Again, in most cases of first love, as I have remarked elsewhere (_R.L.P.B_., 139) "man falls in love with woman, woman with man, not with a particular man or woman." Young men and women inherit, from a long series of ancestors, a disposition to love which at puberty reveals itself in vague longings and dreams. The "bump of amativeness," as a phrenologist might say, is like a powder magazine, ready to explode at a touch, and it makes no great difference what kind of a match is applied. In later love affairs the match is a matter of more importance. Robert Burton threw light on the "capriciousness" and accidentally of this kind of (apparent) amorous preference when he wrote that "it is impossible, almost, for two young folks equal in years to live together and not be in love;" and further he says, sagaciously: "Many a serving man, by reason of this opportunity and importunity, inveigles his master's daughter, many a gallant loves a dowdy, many a gentleman runs after his wife's maids; many ladies dote upon their men, as the queen in Aristo did upon the dwarf, many matches are so made in haste and they are compelled, as it were by necessity, so to love, which had they been free, come in company with others, seen that variety which many places afford, or compared them to a third, would never have looked upon one another." Such passions are merely pent-up emotions seeking to escape one way or another. They do not indicate real, intense preference, but at best an approach to it; for they are not properly individualized, and, as Schopenhauer pointed out, the differences in the intensity of love-cases depend on their different degrees of individualization--an _aperçu_ which this whole chapter confirms. Yet these mere approximations to real preference embrace the vast majority of so-called love-affairs. Genuine preference of the highest type finds its explanation in special phases of sympathy and personal beauty which will be discussed later on.