to give to our lover consists not only in what we are at any given moment but in what we have been in the past, what we may become in the future.  And so in the formation of merely temporary unions the highest and deepest unity can never be fully achieved.”  She went on to say:  “When we have passed beyond the physical sphere we shall be able, like God, to give ourselves equally to all; but while we are in the flesh we cannot share ourselves equally with all, and any attempt to do so lowers the standard of perfect human love.”  I like that, because it is based again on a loyal acceptance of human nature.  We are not yet as God in the sense that, being wholly spirit, we can share ourselves equally with all.  We do still live in bodies, and we have in this life memory and prevision, and surely that is indeed an ideal union, if we are looking for the highest, which is able to give its past and its future as well as its present, so that the whole personality is involved, in that act of union, and that anything short of that is at least not quite perfect.  Human beings are still in the body, and are yet soul and spirit in that body, and must take both into account.  Divorce the physical from the spiritual in yourself, and you are violating yourself.  Divorce the physical from the spiritual in someone else—­you who perhaps say:  “I myself love such a man, such a woman, with the best part of myself; what I do with another is of no importance”—­you violate the nature of that other from whom you take what is physical, and leave what is spiritual as though it were not there.

Your life, like your body, is too highly organized, too sensitive, too knit together by memories and prevision for you to leave behind you anything that has really entered into your life.  It is a shoddy and superficial nature that passes easily from experience to experience, and when you look at such you can see how shallower still it becomes.  It is the deeper and the loftier nature that cannot enter into any human relationship and then pass away from it altogether unchanged.  And even that shoddy, that poor, that mean little soul which seems to pass so lightly from one experience to another does not really altogether escape.  Some mark is left upon the soul, some association remains in the memory; and again and again marriages have been wrecked because a man has taken the associations of the gutter into the sanctuary of his home.  Unwillingly, with an imagination that fain would reject the stain, he has injured, he has insulted the love that has now come to him, the most precious thing on earth, because he has not known how to do otherwise; because all the associations of passion have been to him degraded, smirched, treated frivolously in the past.  It is true of men; it is also true of women.  I do not know of anything that makes understanding harder between two people than the fact that one has had experiences and associations which the other has not had and does not understand, because they are on an entirely different level.  These create between them, with all the desire for understanding in the world, a barrier of misunderstanding and incomprehension, which is all the more fatal because it is so intangible, so obscure, so hard to put into words, so often actually unconscious or subconscious in the mind of one or of the other.