To marry another woman after having offered inalienable and unalterable fidelity to one, would otherwise be a blow to “amour propere”.  And yet, strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely,

This is a fiction but rarely maintained with regard to her own cardiac transportations.  And for this reason:—­

Woman is, and knows herself to be, a multiple personality;

Man, a tyro in emotions, is cast in a simpler mould.  So,

A woman may donate herself piecemeal, or over and over again, yet deem herself perfectly loyal.—­And perhaps naturally and legitimately; for,

That man who will comprehend and appreciate all the intricacies of
feminine emotion . . . . . . . but there is no such being existent. 
Indeed even

Self-revelation is a task no daughter of Eve has achieved.

* * *

To sum up:  between men and women

The consummation of love is a bodily oblation, the outcome of spiritual obsession.—­Must I explain this?  No, I shall not.  Suffice it to say that

The Heavenly Aphrodite is true friend to the Earthly.(4) So

Nothing offends love; since love finds in all that savors of the mortal only a symbol and epitome of the supernatural.  And

There is in Love a cosmic force and secret incomprehensible, incommunicable by man.

Is not, after all, Love the one supreme and significant fact of the cosmos:  indelible, indecipherable:  efflorescing in Man; emerging from the material; idealizing the carnal; pointing to an inscrutable, a spiritual goal?  Can it be that

If we could explain Love, we should explain the cosmos?  What if we could explain why it is that no one single isolated portion of the cosmos can live alone—­and vaunt itself in itself sufficient—­(5), but must seek some other single and isolated portion of the cosmos in order that that very cosmos shall continue, shall evolve, shall go towards its goal . . .  Do we put our finger here upon some curious and recondite cosmic fact utterly transcending our mean comprehension?

(4) Cf.  Plato, Symposium, 180 et seq.

(5) S.T.  Coleridge, “Lectures on Shakespeare”.

* * *

X. On Jealousy

“. . . la jalousie . . . monster odieux.”  —­Moliere

’Ware jealousy as you would ’ware wire:  for it no psychiater has yet discovered a balm.

* * *

To make an experiment of jealousy is to make a very hazardous experiment indeed.

* * *

Jealousy is no proof of love, for

Often jealousy is but rancor under a sense of humiliation.  Indeed,

Jealousy is a sign of weakness: 

The lover whose self-confidence assures him of his pre-eminence fears no rival.  Yet

Male self-confidence is peculiarly vulnerable where women be concerned, since,

As no man knows what it is appeals to a woman, he does not know on what to pride himself: