Claudius, for his part, wondered at himself, when he found a moment to reflect on what he had been saying.  He tried to remember whether any of these thoughts had been formulated in his mind a month ago.  He was, indeed, conscious that his high reverence for women in the abstract had been growing in him for years, but he had had no idea how strong his belief had grown in this reverence as an element in social affairs.  Doubtless the Doctor had often questioned why it was that women had so little weight in the scale, why they did so little of all they might do, and he had read something of their doings across the ocean.  But it had all been vague, thick, and foggy, whereas now it was all sharp and clean-edged.  He had made the first step out of his dreams in that he had thought its realisation possible, and none but dreamers know how great and wide that step is.  The first faint dawning, “It may be true, after all,” is as different from the remote, listless view of the shadowy thought incapable of materialisation, as a landscape picture seen by candle-light is different from the glorious reality of the scene it represents.  Therefore, when Claudius felt the awakening touch, and saw his ideal before him, urging him, by her very existence which made it possible, to begin the fight, he felt the blood run quickly in his veins, and his blue eyes flashed again, and the words came flowing easily and surely from his lips.  But he wondered at his own eloquence, not seeing yet that the divine spark had kindled his genius into a broad flame, and not half understanding what he felt.

It is late in the day to apostrophise love.  It has been done too much by people who persuade themselves that they love because they say they do, and because it seems such a fine thing.  Poets and cynics, and good men and bad, have had their will of the poor little god, and he has grown so shy and retiring that he would rather not be addressed, or described, or photographed in type, for the benefit of the profane.  He is chary of using pointed shafts, and most of his target practice is done with heavy round-tipped arrows that leave an ugly black bruise where they strike, but do not draw the generous blood.  He lurks in out-of-the-way places and mopes, and he rarely springs out suddenly on unwary youth and maid, as he used to in the good old days before Darwin and La Rochefoucauld destroyed the beauty of the body and the beauty of the soul,—­or man’s belief in them, which is nearly the same.  Has not the one taught us to see the animal in the angel, and the other to detect the devil in the saint?  And yet we talk of our loves as angels and our departed parents as saints, in a gentle, commonplace fashion, as we talk of our articles of faith.  The only moderns who apostrophise love with any genuine success are those who smack their lips sensuously at his flesh and blood, because they are too blind to see the lovely soul that is enshrined therein, and they have too little wit to understand that soul and body are one.