Of course, I was speaking of good women.  I once heard a story about a bad woman—­a woman of the world, who was very much amused at being taken seriously by a boy who loved her.  “Tell me all about it,” she would say to him.  “Explain what you feel, why you love me, why you believe in me.  Don’t you see I’m courted and admired—­a social force—­that men flock round me everywhere I go?” “Oh, yes,” said the boy, “I see all that.  But you’re an angel of goodness, and can’t help men liking you.  If I lost faith in you, I’d kill myself.”  “Ah,” she rejoined, “that’s what you all say.  You would doubt me, and live on.”  Then, one afternoon, he had good cause to doubt, inasmuch as her engagement to another man was announced.  That evening she received a note from him:  “Good-bye.  If I lived on, I might doubt; it’s better to die and—­believe!” They told her of the—­the accident that night, and she wrote a touching little paragraph about it for the Society papers before dining out.

* * * * *

[Sidenote:  Gribble generaliseth confidently.]

In a sense, of course, Love is necessarily a fiction, whether pleasing or otherwise; for illusion is of the essence of it.  The lover, in fact, is like the artist who sees things through a temperament, and, by eliminating the irrelevant, builds up the ideal on the foundation of the real.  Tityrus sees more in Amaryllis than his brother shepherds see, just as Mr. Whistler sees more in a November fog than is visible to the eye of the casual wayfarer who gets lost in it, and mingles profanity with his coughs, yet, granting this, the reality and completeness of the illusion does not admit of doubt.  On no alternative hypothesis can the great majority of marriages be explained.  If commonplace people saw each other as others see them, surely they would remain single all their lives.  Yet most people are commonplace, and most people marry.  The reality—­the controlling over-mastering reality—­of Love has to be assumed to make their behaviour intelligible.

[Sidenote:  Having hasted from a wedding for the purpose.]

This point struck me forcibly the last time I was present at a wedding.  It was a Jewish wedding, celebrated at the little synagogue behind the Haymarket.  I had no acquaintance with anyone concerned in the ceremony, but had dropped in quite casually, having heard that Jewish weddings were picturesque.  The one thing that impressed me more than anything else was the decided undesirability of both the bridegroom and the bride.  That the bride was not comely goes for little.  But her forehead indicated a limited range and low ideals; the corners of her mouth spoke of an irritable temper; her bearing was vulgar; her voice had a twang that made one long to take her by the shoulders and shake her violently.  She was also escorted by gaudy female relatives, by looking at whom one could anticipate the awful possibilities of her maturity.  As for the bridegroom, he was