Then one or two things happens: either the man goes off in a
huff; or the girl mends her ways.
* * *
The recurrence of a love is a great shock to love. Love thinks itself a
think unique, unalterable, supreme; a thing not made out of the flux and
change of earthly affairs, but heaven-born and descended from the skies;
that it should go and come seems to destroy the fundamental conception of
love.
* * *
The affianced man thinks he has won him the sweetest, the most sacrosanct
thing that ever trode God's earth outside of Eden: a bundle of blisses, a
compact little mass of exquisite mysteries, whose every tint and curve
and motion are to him sources of wonderment and delight; he is at once
humbled and exalted; he thanks high Heaven for the gift; for that comport
himself worthy of such gift; for that this wondrous and mysterious little
thing called "a woman" should of her own accord put herself in his arms,
to be by him and by him alone cherished and nurtured till death them do
part--this indeed gives the mail heart a very sobering, a very ennobling
thrill; for beneath the heaving breast he so passionately loves, behind
the eyes into the depths of which he so passionately looks, there stirs,
he knows, that ineffable, that indefinable thing, a woman's heart; and
that TO HIM has been committed the keeping of that heart--this rouses in
him the manly virtues as no other thing rouses them.
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