thought of another past that rankles in his spirit like a
poisoned wound. That he himself made a fashion of being alive
in the bald, beggarly days before a certain meeting, is
deplorable enough in all good conscience. But that She should
have permitted herself the same liberty seems inconsistent
with a Divine providence.

A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that
it is an artificial feeling, as well as practically
inconvenient. This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which
it merely attends, like an ill-humoured courtier, is itself
artificial in exactly the same sense and to the same degree.
I suppose what is meant by that objection is that jealousy has
not always been a character of man; formed no part of that
very modest kit of sentiments with which he is supposed to
have begun the world: but waited to make its appearance in
better days and among richer natures. And this is equally
true of love, and friendship, and love of country, and delight
in what they call the beauties of nature, and most other
things worth having. Love, in particular, will not endure any
historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it is
one of the most incontestable facts in the world; but if you
begin to ask what it was in other periods and countries, in
Greece for instance, the strangest doubts begin to spring up,
and everything seems so vague and changing that a dream is
logical in comparison. Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the
consequences of love; you may like it or not, at pleasure; but
there it is.

It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we