Secondly, short absence favours the idealising process in the lover’s mind. Removed from the corrective influence of her actual presence, his imagination may abandon itself to the delightful task of painting a gloriously unreal counterfeit of her charms—which is oil in the flames. This idealising process is facilitated by the strange difficulty which most people—and lovers in particular—experience in recalling the features of those specially dear to them. Given sufficient time to fix the idealised image of the beloved in the memory, and a cure may be effected through the shock subsequently felt on comparing this image with the greatly inferior reality. TRAVEL It is safer, however, not to risk a return, but to avoid sight of her altogether for several years. The advantages of travel are twofold, not to mention the security from the danger of an accidental meeting. At home the surrounding world is too familiar to afford distraction, whereas in a strange place every object claims the attention and diverts the mind from its amorous reveries. More important still is the fact that in a foreign country the strangeness of national physiognomy invests all women with a heightened charm, so that it is easier to find an antidote by falling in love anew. EMPLOYMENT “Great spirits and great business do keep out the weak passion of love,” said Bacon; but long before him Ovid knew that Leisure is Cupid’s chief ally. “If you desire to end your love, employ yourself and you will conquer; for Amor flees business.” He advises military service, agriculture, and hunting as excellent diversions. Poetry and music, however, as the same poet tells us, and all other occupations tending to stir up the tender feelings, are to be carefully avoided. Novel-reading is particularly bad, for to imagine another’s Love is to revive your own. “Lotte Hartmann played some melodies of Bellini on the piano this evening,” writes Lenau; “I ought to avoid music when I am away from you, for it arouses in me a longing and an anguish of consuming violence. I feel how my heart sadly shrinks within itself, and unwillingly continues to beat.” MARRIED MISERY Surely the thought that his romantic adoration will cease with marriage ought to cure a rejected wooer. Unquestionably, marriage is the best cure of Love. For though cynics are wrong in claiming that wedlock changes Love to indifference, it does change it to conjugal affection, which is an entirely different group of emotions. To the rejected lover, unfortunately, matrimony is not available as a cure of his Love. But he may give his overheated imagination an ice-bath by reflecting on the dark side of conjugal life, the promised bliss of which has been described as a mirage by so many great minds. Professor Jowett thus discourses on how a modern Sokrates in a cynical mood might discourse on the seamy side of married life:—