What dominates you is a fever of the blood, an attendant delirium or the mind solely depending on your youth and my passable prettiness. I wish you might have been saved; but it had to happen. I wish, too, that the attack might leave you lightly; but that, also, owing to your unfortunate temperament, is impossible. I can only show my real liking for you by acting sedately, and sitting by your bedside until you rise up sane again and put your hand to the world's work. Do you want this emotion you call love translated to you by a woman who has studied her kind as you study the birds? You say it is, it must be (O, most pitiful cry of the finite after infinity!) eternal. It is nothing of the sort. It is prosaically and sordidly of this earth, especially in the case of men. I grant you that many women do subordinate their lives to what they call a great passion (poor Amelia crying over George's picture! O sad, true travesty of the worship we so exalt!), but it is because they have fewer interests, and because tradition has glorified feminine faithfulness and society built its temples on woman's chastity. But men! I know them. Do not expect me to own, for a moment, that any man is going to worship any woman all his life long with the fervor he shows in pursuing the game. Many are kind, some are tender, even to gray hairs and the grave; but that particular form of idolatry which you offer me like a jewel in a case,--it turns to paste in less than ten years, and I will have none of it. But why, you ask, set myself outside the pale of human kind? It is a joy, though fleeting, and if others prize it, even briefly, why not I? I know myself too well. I am, in many ways, a hard woman. My heart is bedded in a crust of flint, and no daw shall peck at it. But if that armor were worn away, if I did sink my traditions to become all-womanly, if I pinned life and soul and faith and breath to a man--O, I shudder to think of seeing that morning-glow fade into the light of common day. It is such women as I who break their hearts; not your sentimental miss who goes puling about, prating love and religion, and confiding in her pastor. I have laughed long at what I call sentiment, but I am more sentimental than the sentimentalist. I own the awful power of one soul over its opposite; but it is a power to which I will not give way. Now, in plain words, what should be the outcome of love? Marriage. And marriage; what of that? It is a welding of two souls, say you, before an altar where a sacred fire is ever after to be kept burning. According to my idea, gathered from observation, it is a business partnership gilded by certain pretty fictions which no one pretends to observe. For six months, a year, five years, the husband worships his wife with an ideality which ought to turn beggar-maids to queens and queens to angels. Then, plainly, he gets used to her. She is a very good woman, but her like has been seen before, and may be again. His