But you may ask, why have _I_ never married? Well, the answer is a long story in many chapters; but perhaps I may summarise it in a sentence. I have always loved too much. This statement will, no doubt, be regarded as a confession of frequent infidelity, and perhaps I may be misconstrued as a kind of gay Lothario. But I am really no such thing. Though the names of my loves have been many, I have—paradoxical as it may sound—loved the same woman all my life. She is only a fantasy of the heart; yet I have sometimes thought that, after much seeking, I had found the original in flesh and blood, and I have invested her with all the attributes of the ideal woman, the wife of my dreaming, the complement of myself. Then I have loved to idolatry, turned life into a perpetual love-making, and suffered tortures of jealousy until the real woman has revealed herself behind the image of the ideal, and proved but another case of mistaken identity. Yet, though I were less than human, did I not feel some sort of sorrow or disappointment at the first perception of my mistake, it has left no bitterness, for the fault has been invariably my own. I had clothed with my own ideas an entity sufficiently beautiful in herself, and loved her, not for the woman that she was, but for the woman that I wanted her to be. How, then, could there be perfect sympathy between us? We were playing at cross-purposes. If she cared for me at all, it was as one who loved her for herself; not as one who was endeavouring to model her to the mould of his own mind, when he found that, after all, she was a misfit. The misunderstanding was of my own making, for, as I am beginning to find out, ideals are impracticable in the commerce of life. To be happy, one must have no preconceived notions, but “catch the joy as it flies,” and accept that which is for what it is. Nevertheless, though my life has been a series of individual disillusionings, and while I cannot but feel that an excellent husband has been squandered in me, I have never loved in vain. Even in my sorrowful awakenings to the fact that the One Woman is still a Will-o’-the-Wisp to me, and that she whom I had permitted to personate her, and had taken to my heart in her place, is, after all, hopelessly separate from me, I have invariably felt the better for the experience. Our natures always gain by love, even though it be fruitless; it opens the pores of our souls, and lets in charity, which is the very sap of society. And each fresh experience of love adds to one’s store of sympathy, and increases one’s knowledge of “Womanity”—if I may be allowed the term—and consequently one’s power of loving. “Appetite grows by what it feeds on,” and so the more one loves the more one needs to love, and it is very pleasant.