Certainly we were looked upon as peculiar because, being married, we were so much together.

The true explanation is perhaps that, as a rule, the people who love do not marry, and those who marry do not love.

Coming home from our supper after the opera, I felt the same passionate delight in Viola as that first evening when I had driven her to my studio.  Waking in the dawn to find her sleeping on my arm, I had the same joyous elation as I had known under the thatched roof, during our first stay together.  Unfortunately, however, a great passion for one object does not necessarily exclude lesser passions, or, rather, passing fancies of the senses for other objects.  It is generally supposed that it does, but my experience is rather to the contrary.

With women possibly it may do so oftener than with men, but extreme constancy, absolute exclusiveness is not the natural product of a great passion.  It is a question rather of sentiment and artificial restraint.

Nature is not on the side of sentiment.  She is always a prodigal, with the one great aim before her of ensuring the continuance of the race.

Consequently, when a man is already loving one object with all his force, it is not Nature’s plan to make him turn from all others by instinct.  No, she is ever ready with others, ever rather prompting him, leading him towards others, in order that, should accident or death remove his first mate, others should not be wanting, and her great scheme should not be spoiled nor interrupted.

Nature is always on a grand scale, always acting in and for the plural, never for the singular.

Does she want one oak to survive, she throws on the ground a million acorns for that purpose.

Man she has fitted to love not one, but hundreds, and our senses act automatically and are always on the side of Nature.  It is the mind alone that man has taught to act against her, and that demands and gives fidelity in love.

A woman’s attitude towards a second lover, when she is deeply in love with the first, is not so often “I don’t want him,” as “It would grieve my first lover, therefore I will not take him.”

A man, when offered a second mistress, usually thinks “I will take her, but I mustn’t let the first one know.”  In both it is the anxiety of Nature that neither should be left mateless, part of her tremendous scheme of insurance against mischance.

And all this great love and passion which I had for Viola, passion which exhausted me almost to the point sometimes of being unable to work, did not seal my senses against the beauty of Veronica—­beauty I painted daily in the studio.

I used to enjoy the afternoon spent there now with a different pleasure from that of work merely.  The sensuous attraction had become very great, and I was beginning to feel it was not innocent and to half-long for, half-dread an interruption, something to break through it, end it.