* * *

It is a feminine motto that a woman needs to be taught how to love.  Perhaps she does; but most men will think one private tutor ought to suffice, and that tutor ought to be he.  At all events,

The last schoolmaster would be apt to regard with somewhat mixed feelings the tuition of previous crammers.

Why go to the trouble of explaining away a first love, if the second is no whit its inferior?  Unless it be to overcome.

What a second love chiefly deplores is:  that it was not he (or she) who first taught his (or her) loved one to love.  Is it not true also that

It is the first love that amazes, that beautifies, that consecrates?

(An illicit love beautifies and consecrates nothing: 

A Maud leaves the daisies rosy; not so Faustine.)

Many a woman has given her heart to one lover and herself to another. 
The first is always won; the second is sometimes extorted.  Yet,

It is wonderful how a woman will contrive to make all her lovers believe they are winners.

* * *

It often gives a lady a pleasure to give her lover a pang.

* * *

Not many but have tasted the bitterness of the conflict between the desire of the flesh and the resentment of the spirit.  Explain these terms who may.

* * *

To attempt by erring to cure an erring lover, is to administer, not an antidote, but an adjuvant.  It works poison in the blood.  When (and if) in a tortuous love, a man arrives at a ‘Don’t give a damn’ stage, he is not to be classed with the animals known as docile.  And as to a woman. . . . . . . but polite language has its limits.

* * *

Many a man has be exasperated, not only by the audacity of his rival, but by the equanimity with which his lady-love views that audacity.  He forgets that, as a rule,

Feminine complaisance varies directly as masculine audacity.  And yet, often enough, as a simple matter of fact, 118 Masculine diffidence is vastly more potent than masculine audacity.  And further,

Rarely need the complaisance that audacity evokes perturb the diffident man; since

Rarely need the complaisance that audacity evokes perturb the diffident man; since

The true woman may give her fingertips to the gallant; she gives herself to the worshiper.  The pity o’ it is that

The worshiper cannot away with the complaisance that permits a woman to give even her finger-tips to the gallant.  And

Few are the women who have plumbed the silent and sensitive depths of the diffidence of her devotee.  The worst of it is,

The devotee essays two things:  he would apotheosize the object of his adoration and place her as a constellation among the stars; yet he would have her at the same time terrestrial and tangible.  When the woman shows herself terrestrial and tangible to others than he, the faith of the devotee is shaken.  In fine,