Can any sensible novelist hesitate? Does a shoe-maker depreciate leather? Would you saw off the tree-branch you sit on? Now, on this subject, anybody's opinion (full-grown) is as good as another's. Let the footman bring down word that love is the drawing-room topic, and the cook will cry out, "What do they know more about it than _us_?" Is it not a human feeling, call it instinct or no? Surely old Sally Jones has simpler feelings than the Dowager Countess; as much experience in this. Love is just as real as a rainbow on a wet day; as--as influenza. The first may be a "pleysing payne": the latter must be a very displeasing one. But there is little fiction about either to the victims. Well, suppose love a mere brain-fantasm; an odd survival when sensible folk have swept away beliefs in witchcraft, fairies, and the virtue of fire and faggot for the wicked ones who don't say their prayers the same way we do. _Still, was it not worth while to have invented it?_ However the idea was evoluted, just consider the glamour it throws over thorns and thistles, as we dig through life's long day of toil. As Trollope's stout widow says, when choosing her second: "It's a whiff of the rocks and the valleys." (So she had her marriage settlements tightly drawn up, to enjoy her romance comfortably.) Consider this epitaph--a real one-- "Poorly lived, and poorly died; Poorly buried, and _nobody cried_." Broach this subject of love to a circle after dinner, round a good fire. Everybody laughs! The young men and maidens look conscious. What they feel is as real to them as pleasure in music they hear; in the taste of wine. Yes, and far more--while it lasts. Some elders profess scorn, because their minds are so choked with years' dust of daily cares they have forgotten how they, too, once believed love real--while it lasted! Ay! there's the rub. You are told--truthfully--that love is strong as death: inconstant as every breeze. Some declare, for them-- "In the whole wide world there was but one." Other as honest souls confess their hearts have known, since first love, "many other lodgers." This seems clear, love is real to those who _give it_! Only they who care more to _get it_, call it moonshine and naughty names. Like figures on an Egyptian monument, each follows one who looks at another. Never one scorned, but has rejected a third. "As Pan loved Echo, Echo loved the satyr, The satyr Lyda--and so the three went weeping." * * * * * [Sidenote: Miss Quiller Couch wishes Love were a pleasing fiction.]