"O yes, we've all been in love. We can all remember the kisses we gave and the kisses given to us in the moonlight. But that's the body. The body's damnably exacting. It wants to kiss and to be kissed at certain times and seasons. It isn't particular however; give it moonlight and young lips and it's soon satisfied. It's only when we don't pay for it that we call it romance and love, and the most we would ever pay is a £5 note. "But it's not love, not the other, the real, the mysterious thing. That too exists, I've seen it, I tell you, but it's rare, Lord, it's rare. I'm middle-aged. I've seen men, thousands of them, all over the world, known them too, made it my business to know them, it interests me, a hobby like collecting stamps. And I've only known two cases of real love. "And neither of them had anything to do with kisses and moonlight. Why should they? When it comes, it comes in strange ways and places, like most real things perversely and unreasonably. I suppose scientifically it's all right--it's what the mathematician calls the law of chances. "I'll tell you about one of them." There was a man--you may have read his books, so I wont give you his name--though he's dead now--I'll call him Reynolds. He was at Rugby with me and also at Corpus. He was a thin feeble looking chap, very nervous, with a pale face and long pale hands. He was bullied a good deal at school; he was what they call a smug. I knew him rather well; there seemed to me to be something in him somewhere, some power of feeling under the nervousness and shyness. I can't say it ever came out, but he interested me. I went East and he stayed at home and wrote novels. I read them; very romantic they were too, the usual ideas of men and women and love. But they were clever in many ways, especially psychologically, as it was called. He was a success, he made money. I used to get letters from him about once in three months, so when he came travelling to the East, it was arranged that he would stay a week with me. I was in Colombo at that time, right in the passenger route. I found him one day on the deck of a P and O just the same as I'd last seen him in Oxford, except for the large sun helmet on his head and the blue glasses on his nose. And when I got him back to the bungalow and began to talk with him on the broad verandah, I found that he was still just the same inside too. The years hadn't touched him anywhere, he hadn't in the ordinary sense lived at all. He had stood aside--do you see what I mean?--from shyness, nervousness, the remembrance and fear of being bullied, and watched other people living. He knew a good deal about how other people think, the little tricks and mannerisms of life and novels, but he didn't know how they felt; I expect he had never felt anything himself, except fear and shyness: he hadn't really ever known a man, and he had certainly never known a woman.