But the disinclination goes not, though the poor passion has, of course, its occasional leapings in the socket, and the pain has to come at last, for all that dainty consideration, which, moreover, has been all the time feeding larger capacities for suffering. For, of course, no man thinks of marrying his twelfth love, though in the thirteenth there is usually danger; and he who has jilted, so to say, an earl's daughter as his sixth, may come to see 'The God of Love, ah! benedicite, How mighty and how great a lord is he' in the thirteenth Miss Simpkins. But this is to write as an outsider: for that thirteenth, by a mystical process which has given to each of its series in its day the same primal quality, is, of course, not only the last, but the first. And, indeed, with little casuistry, that thirteenth may be truly held to be the first, for it is a fact determined not so much by the chosen maid as by him who chooses, though he himself is persuaded quite otherwise. To him his amorous career has been hitherto an unsuccessful pursuit, because each followed fair in turn, when at length he has caught her flying skirts, and looked into her face, has proved not that 'ideal'-- 'That not impossible she That shall command my heart and me'-- but another, to be shaken free again in disappointment. In truth, however, the lack has been in himself all this time. He had yet to learn what loving indeed meant: and he loves the thirteenth, not because she is pre-eminent beyond the rest, but because she has come to him at the moment when that 'lore of loving' has been revealed. Had any of those earlier maidens fallen on the happy conjunction, they would, doubtless, have proved no less loveworthy, and seemed no less that 'ideal' which they have since become, one may be sure, for some other illuminated soul. Of course, some find that love early--the baby-love, whom one never marries, and then the faithful service. Probably it happens so with the majority of men; for it is, I think, especially to the artist nature that it comes thus late. Living so vividly within the circle of its own experience, by its very constitution so necessarily egoistic, the latter, more particularly in its early years, is always a Narcissus, caring for nought or none except in so much as they reflect back its own beauty or its own dreams. The face such a youth looks for, as he turns the coy captured head to meet his glance, is, quite unconsciously, his own, and the 'ideal' he seeks is but the perfect mirror. Yet it is not that mirror he marries after all: for when at last he has come to know what that word--one so distasteful, so 'soiled' to his ear 'with all ignoble' domesticity--what that word 'wife' really expresses, he has learnt, too, to discredit those cynical guides of his youth who love so well to write Ego as the last word of human nature.