“Yes, of a sort, no doubt; but not a very good one.”

“You are thinking, then, of a special kind of love?”

“I am thinking of the kind which I conceive to be the best.”

“And what is that?”

“One, as I said just now, that should be eternal and all-comprehensive.”

“And so, in the end, you have nothing better than an imaginary heaven to land us in!”

“I have no power, I fear, to land you there.  But I believe there is that dwelling within you which will not let you rest in anything short.”

“Then I fear I shall never rest!”

“That may be.  But meantime all I want to do is to ascertain, if we can, the meaning of your unrest.  I have no interest in what you call an imaginary heaven, except in so far as its conception is necessary to enable us to interpret the world we know.”

“But how should it be necessary?  I have never found it so.”

“It is necessary, I think, to explain our dissatisfaction.  For the Goods we actually realize always point away from themselves to some other Good whose realization perhaps, as you say, for us is impossible.  But even if the Good were chimerical, we cannot deny the passion that pursues it; for it is the same passion that urges us to the pursuit of such Goods as we really can attain.  And if we want to understand the nature of that passion, we must understand the nature of its Good, whether it be attainable or no.  Only it is for the sake of life here that we need that comprehension, not for the sake of life somewhere else.”

“But do you reduce our passion for Good to this passion for Love?”

“I don’t ‘reduce’ it; I interpret it so.”

“And so we come back to the girl and the boy and the village green!”

“No! we come back to the whole of life, of which that is only an episode.  Let me try to explain how the thing presents itself to me.”

“By all means!  That is what I want.”

“Very well; I will do my best.  Let us look then at life just as it is.  Here we find ourselves involved with one another in the most complex relations—­economic, political, social, domestic, and the rest; and about and in these relations centres the interest of our life, whether it be pleasurable or painful, empty or full, or whatever its character.  Among these relations some few perhaps—­or, it may be, even none—­realize for a longer or shorter time, with more or less completeness, that ultimate identity in diversity, that ‘me in thee’ which we call love; the rest comprise various degrees of attraction and repulsion, hatred, contempt, indifference, toleration, respect, sympathy, and so on; and all together, always changing, dissolving, and combining anew, weave about us, as they cross and intertwine, the shifting, restless web we call life.  Now these relations are an effect and result of the pursuit of Good; but they are never the final goal of that pursuit.  The goal, I think, would be a perfect