become importunate and violent. Vanity in a merely personal
sense exists no longer. The lover takes a perilous pleasure
in privately displaying his weak points and having them, one
after another, accepted and condoned. He wishes to be assured
that he is not loved for this or that good quality, but for
himself, or something as like himself as he can contrive to
set forward. For, although it may have been a very difficult
thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act
of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of
art before every one in this world who cares to set about
explaining his own character to others. Words and acts are
easily wrenched from their true significance; and they are all
the language we have to come and go upon. A pitiful job we
make of it, as a rule. For better or worse, people mistake
our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation. And
generally we rest pretty content with our failures; we are
content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but when once
a man is moonstruck with this affection of love, he makes it a
point of honour to clear such dubieties away. He cannot have
the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this importance;
and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.

He discovers a great reluctance to return on former
periods of his life. To all that has not been shared with
her, rights and duties, bygone fortunes and dispositions, he
can look back only by a difficult and repugnant effort of the
will. That he should have wasted some years in ignorance of
what alone was really important, that he may have entertained
the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is a
burthen almost too heavy for his self-respect. But it is the