She reached home, at any rate,
without accident; but even there she felt a change in herself, a
new feeling that she could not shake off. For her, there was now
but one man in the world; which is to say that henceforth she
cared to shine for his sake alone.
While the physiologist can define love promptly by following out
natural laws, the moralist finds a far more perplexing problem
before him if he attempts to consider love in all its
developments due to social conditions. Still, in spite of the
heresies of the endless sects that divide the church of Love,
there is one broad and trenchant line of difference in doctrine,
a line that all the discussion in the world can never deflect. A
rigid application of this line explains the nature of the crisis
through which the Duchess, like most women, was to pass. Passion
she knew, but she did not love as yet.
Love and passion are two different conditions which poets and men
of the world, philosophers and fools, alike continually confound.
Love implies a give and take, a certainty of bliss that nothing
can change; it means so close a clinging of the heart, and an
exchange of happiness so constant, that there is no room left for
jealousy. Then possession is a means and not an end;
unfaithfulness may give pain, but the bond is not less close; the
soul is neither more nor less ardent or troubled, but happy at
every moment; in short, the divine breath of desire spreading
from end to end of the immensity of Time steeps it all for us in
the selfsame hue; life takes the tint of the unclouded heaven.
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