This change is the last and highest pain of romance--the breaking apart of the temporal, for the story of the long road. Man and woman must go apart for the mastery of self, before they are ready for the higher mating. The great love story invariably crosses the mountains of separation. If we cling too long to the less, nature is outraged, beauty is drained. Brief separations are dangerous, because the lovers build recklessly with ideals and the rarest spiritual materials. Meeting again too soon, they encounter an unmiraculous creature face to face. If they had really completed the journey, finished the task apart, they would have come into that tenderness which loves the human frailties of each other, and which sees the manifest of three-score-ten merely as a garment particularly made for a particular journey. * * * * * There is always wrecking work, before a new and wider circle is entered upon. The time will come when men and women shall learn that the magic of going apart is equal to the magic of coming together. In all birth-times, in all transitions, the consciousness of the bearer is changed--often queerly.... One can endure the primitive and the child in the other's mind; one might adore the great play of passion, and all the art of it; one might never weary of fragrance of throat, or magnetism of hand, the inimitable plays and child things--but the mind is forever the slayer of the real.... Remember, there is not a full union possible on the physical plane. The body is the barrier that separates souls. Those who believe they have all of each other in that which they see and hear and touch--have far to come in the real love story. Have you ever asked yourself what physical passion is? It is a frenzy to overcome separation. This separation was necessary for the diffusion of life. It is the outbreath, the going forth, the great generative plan.... Physical passion does not satisfy the agony of the soul; often it only makes the agony more keen. In the early phenomena of all great love stories, there is encountered that blinding, bewildering need _to become the other_--to lose identity, to fly somehow into the breast of the other and be no more. This is keen pain of love but also an intimation of greater union. * * * * *