’That not impossible she
  That shall command my heart and me’—­

but another, to be shaken free again in disappointment.  In truth, however, the lack has been in himself all this time.  He had yet to learn what loving indeed meant:  and he loves the thirteenth, not because she is pre-eminent beyond the rest, but because she has come to him at the moment when that ‘lore of loving’ has been revealed.  Had any of those earlier maidens fallen on the happy conjunction, they would, doubtless, have proved no less loveworthy, and seemed no less that ‘ideal’ which they have since become, one may be sure, for some other illuminated soul.

Of course, some find that love early—­the baby-love, whom one never marries, and then the faithful service.  Probably it happens so with the majority of men; for it is, I think, especially to the artist nature that it comes thus late.  Living so vividly within the circle of its own experience, by its very constitution so necessarily egoistic, the latter, more particularly in its early years, is always a Narcissus, caring for nought or none except in so much as they reflect back its own beauty or its own dreams.  The face such a youth looks for, as he turns the coy captured head to meet his glance, is, quite unconsciously, his own, and the ‘ideal’ he seeks is but the perfect mirror.  Yet it is not that mirror he marries after all:  for when at last he has come to know what that word—­one so distasteful, so ‘soiled’ to his ear ’with all ignoble’ domesticity—­what that word ‘wife’ really expresses, he has learnt, too, to discredit those cynical guides of his youth who love so well to write Ego as the last word of human nature.

But the particular Narcissus of whom I write was a long way off that thirteenth maid in the days of his antiquarian rambles and his Pagan-Catholic ardours, and the above digression is at least out of date.

A copy of Keats which I have by me as I write is a memorial of one of the pretty loves typical of that period.  It is marked all through in black lead—­not so gracefully as one would have expected from the ’taper fingers’ which held the pencil, but rather, it would appear, more with regard to emphasis than grace.  Narcissus had lent it to the queen of the hour with special instructions to that end, so that when it came to him again he might ravish his soul with the hugging assurance given by the thick lead to certain ecstatic lines of Endymion, such as—­

    ’My soul doth melt
  For the unhappy youth;’
    ’He surely cannot now
  Thirst for another love;’

and luxuriate in a genial sense of godship where the tremulous pencil had left the record of a sigh against—­

  ‘Each tender maiden whom he once thought fair.’