Chopin's bodily appearance was marked by an entire absence of the robust; his features indicated delicate and refined feeling; his tastes were fastidious; his manner smooth and faultless with the last polish. This much created an impression as of a feminine personality, but the real, virile man was there, well-hidden beneath his mask. «George Sand,» as that nom de plume would indicate, claimed for herself almost every masculine prerogative. With manly daring and physical vitality, she overleaped convention as but the walls of a prison-pen fit only for the shutting in of little minds. And yet, before some noble and deep nature, a softest fire would mount to those dark eyes of hers, and voice and mien revealed the «Eternal Womanly,» which often outlined and sometimes portrayed itself upon her most tender, soulful pages. From trustworthy accounts we conclude that Chopin was at first repelled, not by any physical lack, for Madame Dudevant had just and ample claims to comeliness, but rather from his inability to divine at once the basic affinity which afterwards drew and held him despite external dissimilarities. Not so with the great novelist to whose feminine insight much of the analytical, masculine mind was added. She at once divined Chopin, and whatever was defective in him the glamour of sex made good; so she desisted not until she had made him her own. The beauty and symmetry and fragrance of the flower is the complete expression of a life simple because low in the scale of evolution; but the beauty and symmetry of the masculine human form, together with every endowment of the characteristic masculine mind, only half expresses the rounded whole of the complex human soul, itself sexless because above sex. What is true of man is equally so of woman. The man and the woman of genius each recognizes in the other the riches and worth of that hemisphere of the soul adequately revealed only by that other. This perception of a mutual need is the prompter of love between men and women high in the scale of human evolution; it is in fact the cause of love even in the most unthinking; those whom only the wisdom of Nature enlightens. Like Beethoven, who sighed for his «Immortal Beloved,» Chopin himself had loved and more than once. That half of his being which, because a man, he failed to realize as an inward belonging, he had projected as an ideal clothed with the grace and beauty of womankind. That ideal had looked into his eyes with tender recognition, or a glance almost of scorn had wholly told his poor unworth. But, favoring or reproving, that ideal had vanished utterly and forever, and now his heart indeed was lone save in brief, exalted moments of genius. Then the soul in its entirety would assert itself, and amidst that fullness he needed no other company.