But apart from these extreme instances which may be due to special causes, the general principle of compensation through opposites is very obvious and marked. The fluffy and absurd little woman is selected by a tall and statuesque grenadier; the tall and statuesque lady is made love to by a man who has to stand on a chair to kiss her; the society elegant takes to a snuffy and preposterous professor; the bookish scholar (as in _Jude the Obscure_) to a mere whore; the clever beauty (as in _L’homme qui rit_) to a grinning clown; and of course the ‘wicked’ man is always saved by the saintly woman. The masculine, virago-like woman, on the other hand, finds a man who positively _likes_ being beaten with a stick; and the miaowling, aimlessly amiable female gets a bully for a husband (and one can only say, “Serve them both right”)... Finally, the well-formed aquiline nose insists on marrying a pug nose—and this apparently quite regardless of what the other bodily and mental parts may be, or what they may want. Everyone knows cases of quite young men who only love women of really advanced age, beyond the limit of childbirth; and these are curious because they seem to point to impelling forces in love beyond and independent of generation and race-perpetuation, and therefore lying outside of the Schopenhauerian explanations. And similarly we all know cases of young girls who are deadly earnest in their affection for quite old men, men who might well be their fathers or grandfathers, but hardly, one would think, their husbands. In these cases it looks as if the young thing needs and seeks a parent as well as a lover—the two in one, combined. And where such love is returned, it is returned in a kind of protective love, rather than an amative love—or at any rate as a love in which the protective and amative characters are closely united. Similarly there are numbers of cases in which mature or quite grown men and women only love (passionately and devotedly) boys and girls of immature age—their love for them ceasing from its ardor and intensity when the objects of devotion reach the age, say, of twenty or twenty-one. And in many of these cases the love is ardently returned. Here, again, it is evidently not a case of generation or race-perpetuation, but simply of compensation—the young thing requiring the help and protection of the older, and the older requiring an outlet for the protective instinct—a case of exchange of essences and qualities which (if at all decently and sensibly managed) might well go to the building up of a full and well-rounded life on either side.