Many a parent and many an aunt will maintain that the girls are passive, that it is the boys who keep the quarrel alive, though this is merely to deny the relation between cause and result, and the truth is that the boys are only the noisier and franker in the exchange of reciprocal provocations. And since adults are but experienced children, we find illumination upon such a point in examples of the feud’s revival in middle age; for it is indeed sometimes revived, even under conditions of matrimony. A great deal of coldness was shown to the suburban butcher who pushed his wife into his sausage vat. “Stay!” the philosopher protested. “We do not know what she had said to him.” The feud is often desultory and intermittent; and of course it does not exist between every boy and every girl; a _Montagu_ may hate the _Capulets_ with all his vitals, yet feel an extraordinary kindness toward one exceptional _Capulet_. Thus, Master Laurence Coy, nine, permitted none to surpass him in hating girls. He proclaimed his bitterness, and made the proclamation in public. (At a party in his own house and given in his own honour, with girls for half his guests, he went so far as to state—not in a corner, whispering, but in the centre of the largest room and shouting—that he hated every last thing about ’em. It seemed that he wished to avoid ambiguity.) And yet, toward one exceptional little girl he was as water. Was what he felt for Elsie Threamer love? Naturally, the answer must depend upon a definition of the word; and there are definitions varying from the frivolous _mots_ tossed off by clergymen to the fanatical dogmas of coquettes. Mothers, in particular, have their own definitions, which are so often different from those of their sons that no one will ever be able to compute the number of mothers who have informed sons, ranging in age from fourteen to sixty-two, that what those sons mistook for love, and insisted was love, was not love. Yet the conclusion seems to be inevitable that behind all the definitions there is but one actual thing itself; that it may be either a force, or a condition produced by a force, or both; and that although the phenomena by which its presence may be recognized are of the widest diversity, they may be somewhat roughly classified according to the ages of the persons affected. Finally, a little honest research will convince anybody that these ages range from seven months to one hundred and thirty-four years; and if scriptural records are accepted, the latter figure must be much expanded.