This is an extremely delicate psychological feature. For man the choice is not the matter of chief importance, but for woman it is. A man, however refined and cultured, could be quite happy with twenty or thirty women who were entirely different from one another, and he could feel himself warmly attracted by any one of them without his strongest emotions being stirred or his whole existence responding; but for a woman the absolute in love is the greatest, the only great event in her life. For this reason the superior woman will always be the chooser, she will always realise what the man is to her long before he knows it; her silent love will always be the first attraction and will bind him as it were with a thousand invisible cords, while the strange atmosphere which proceeds from her will wrap him round like the tremulous mist on a hot summer’s noon. Yet at first he does not, except under the most propitious circumstances, understand that this woman is sympathetic to him, but when the secret workings of organic attraction have completed themselves, he suddenly awakes to find that he is surrounded by a great and ardent love. In those rare cases when a man loves with the whole passion of his nature, and when his love is not, as it is oftenest described, and in our time of cultured barbarism too often is, a perverseness--_i.e._ love for a woman who has frequently experienced love already--in those rare cases it is always the woman who gives the first impulse, and in Heyse’s writings it is invariably the woman. In order to awake a deep, lasting and spiritual emotion in man, a woman needs more than mere physical attraction, she needs a spiritualised womanliness with all the enduring charm of its indestructible intensity. The Incommensurable in love is not a primeval quality in man as it is in woman; a man may have great nobility of soul and yet be able to exist without it, whereas a woman cannot. For her it is the primal condition of her being; for him it is an unexpected, charmed light, illumining his whole existence. _The Author in a Cul-de-sac_ _Henrik Ibsen_ The artists and authors of our day have one peculiarity in common, which is that they, with one or two exceptions, have no idea of perspective either with regard to the future or the past. Their perspective in the past is shown by Ebers among the Pyramids, and Alma Tadema among the broken pots of Mycenæ. Their perspective in the future is an outlook into a cul-de-sac. The majority of authors in the latter half of this century have conducted their readers by a more or less roundabout path into a cul-de-sac, where they have left them; it has occurred so often that the reading public have begun to lose patience. This fondness for cul-de-sacs is clearly perceived in the drama of our time.