Love, no doubt, is a subject of popular interest, but a man is always staggered to find his sister holding an opinion upon it.  If I remember rightly, in the days when Lilian Quiller Couch (then aged seven) did me the honour of playing Juliet to my Romeo, the interest was mainly acrobatic, Romeo descending the gardener’s ladder head-foremost, while Juliet tilted her body as far over the nursery window-sill as she could manage without breaking her neck.  We “cut” the love speeches.  Two years later, indeed, my sister schemed to marry me to our common governess.  There was no love on my side; so she turned over the Prayer-book, hoping to find “A man may not marry his governess” in the table of Forbidden Degrees.  Such a prohibition (she well knew) would be a trumpet-call to my native spirit of disobedience.  But I am convinced that even then the nature of true affection did not enter into her calculations.  She merely counted on my marital influence to end or mend the French irregular verbs.  I am delighted that, in these later days, she sees Love to be a “practical reality.”  For my part, I want a definition.  Popular custom bestows the name of Love on a green sickness which is in fact a part of Nature’s wise economy.  I will expound.  Almost all young men, say between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, incline to consume much meat and do next to no work.  Were there no corrective, it is clear that in a few years the face of the earth would be eaten bare as by locusts.  But at this season Nature by the simplest stroke—­the flush of a commonplace cheek, the warm touch of a commonplace hand—­in a twinkling redresses the balance.  Forthwith the ideal devourer of crops and herbs not only loses his appetite, but arising, smacks the earth with a hoe till the clods fly and the fields laugh with harvest.  Thereon he mops his steaming brow, bedecks him with a bunch of white ribbons, and jogs jovially to church arm in arm with the pretty cause of all this beneficent disturbance.  And the spectacle is mighty taking and commendable; but you’ll excuse me for holding that it is not Love.  It bears about the same relation to Love that Bumble-puppy bears to good whist.  Among the eccentricities that make up the Average Man I find none more diverting than his complacent belief that he is, or has been, or will certainly some day be, in love.  As a matter of fact, the capacity to love belongs to one man or woman in ten thousand.  Listen to Matthew Arnold: 

    “But in the world I learnt, what there
      Thou wilt too surely one day prove,
    That will, that energy, though rare,
      Are yet far, far less rare than love.”

I go further and believe it rarer even than Genius.  Indeed, the capacity to love, is a specialised form of genius.  You understand that I am not commending it.  Its possessors are often disreputable and almost always unhappy.  Their recompense is that they, and they only, have seen the splendours of the passion, and vibrated to the shaking inner music of the sheep-boy’s pipe.