For instance, a man kisses the woman he loves, and she responds to his caress. He believes it is in the same passionate spirit, but really the impulse is subtly different. He kisses her to satisfy his own yearning; she kisses him because she knows it will make him happy, and to make him happy is the active spirit of her love. And it is just the failure of man to distinguish and accept this beautiful spirituality in woman’s relations with him, which necessitates that protective dissimulation which becomes her second nature. For example, here the woman must simulate the passion of her lover, for he would not be satisfied with the delicate impulse of her responsive caress; so is he permitted to believe that she feels as he does, reasoning only from his own emotions, while she instinctively knows that their feelings are running in different channels, though they meet in the broad ocean of love. How true to womanhood is that passage in the journal of that extraordinary girl, Marie Bashkirtseff, where, relating how, in response to the passionate protestations of a youthful lover, she kissed him, she adds, “I did it more for his sake than mine.” Did the young man think it was for his sake? Not a bit of it. He thought it was a passionate impulse for her own gratification, as any man in his place would have thought. But what must be the result of all this misunderstanding if the lover be one of your unqualified amateurs? After marriage the wife, happy in the possession of the husband she loves, believes that all is mutual trust, and she ceases to practise that beautifully innocent dissimulation by which she held him as a lover. Then he begins to misunderstand, and her love seems not the same to him, though it has been unchanged all the while; so his love grows colder as he becomes consequently dissatisfied and irritable, and, with this rift within the lute, the music of matrimony sounds out of tune and grates upon their ears, and the lovers drift into mere husband and housewife—lovers no more. But I am getting serious and psychological, and what has an incorrigible bachelor like me to do with the psychology of woman? I have but to glance round my companionless room, and a photograph on the mantelpiece, a picture on the wall, a book on the shelf, a faded letter-case on the table, will remind me how little I really know of it all; else, perhaps, who knows? the wife of my dreams might even now be sitting in that chair yonder, where those books and newspapers rest in such confusion, and the sweet, happy voices of children might be waking the slumbering soul of the room to joyous laughter, and I should not want an excuse to fling away my pen, and romp on the floor with the little ones, and play with their toys, while _she_ smiled happily, and called me a “great baby.”