But surely, of all men, he could best afford that one such pleasant chance should put forth no other blossom save that half-dreamed kiss;—­and how can one ever foresee but that our so cherishable spray of bloom may in time add but another branch to that orchard of Dead Sea fruit which grows inevitably about all men’s dwellings?

I do not suppose that Narcissus was really as exceptional in the number and character of his numerous boyish loves as we always regarded him as being.  It is no uncommon matter, of course and alas! for a youth between the ages of seventeen and nineteen to play the juggler at keeping three, or even half-a-dozen, female correspondents going at once, each of whom sleeps nightly with copious documentary evidence of her sole and incontrovertible possession of the sacred heart.  Nor has Narcissus been the only lover, I suspect, who, in the season of the waning of the moon, has sent such excuses for scrappy epistolary make-shifts as ’the strident din of an office, an air so cruelly unsympathetic, as frost to buds, to the blossoming of all those words of love that press for birth,’ when, as a matter of fact, he has been unblushingly eating the lotus, in the laziest chair at home, in the quietest night of summer.  Such insincerity is a common besetting sin of the young male; invariably, I almost think, if he has the artistic temperament.  Yet I do not think it presents itself to his mind in its nudity, but comes clothed with that sophistry in which youth, the most thoroughgoing of philosophes, is so ingenious.  Consideration for the beloved object, it is called—­yes! beloved indeed, though, such is the paradox in the order of things, but one of the several vestals of the sacred fire.  One cannot help occasional disinclination on a lazy evening, confound it! but it makes one twinge to think of paining her with such a confession; and a story of that sort—­well, it’s a lie, of course; but it’s one without any harm, any seed of potential ill, in it.  So the letter goes, maybe to take its place as the 150th of the sacred writings, and make poor Daffodilia, who has loved to count the growing score, happy with the completion of the half-century.

But the disinclination goes not, though the poor passion has, of course, its occasional leapings in the socket, and the pain has to come at last, for all that dainty consideration, which, moreover, has been all the time feeding larger capacities for suffering.  For, of course, no man thinks of marrying his twelfth love, though in the thirteenth there is usually danger; and he who has jilted, so to say, an earl’s daughter as his sixth, may come to see

  ’The God of Love, ah! benedicite,
  How mighty and how great a lord is he’

in the thirteenth Miss Simpkins.

But this is to write as an outsider:  for that thirteenth, by a mystical process which has given to each of its series in its day the same primal quality, is, of course, not only the last, but the first.  And, indeed, with little casuistry, that thirteenth may be truly held to be the first, for it is a fact determined not so much by the chosen maid as by him who chooses, though he himself is persuaded quite otherwise.  To him his amorous career has been hitherto an unsuccessful pursuit, because each followed fair in turn, when at length he has caught her flying skirts, and looked into her face, has proved not that ’ideal’—­