“For what is love?” he asked.  “Is it a garment, a jewel, a fanciful ornament which only boys and girls may wear upon a summer’s holiday?  May we take it or leave it, as we please?  Wear it, if it shows well upon our beauty, or cast it off for others to put on when we limp aside out of the race of fashion to halt and breathe before we die?  Is love beauty?  Is love youth?  Is love yellow hair or black?  Is love the rose upon the lip or the peach blossom in the cheek, that only the young may call it theirs?  Is it an outward grace, which can live but so long as the other outward graces are its companions, to perish when the first gray hair streaks the dark locks?  Is it a glass, shivered by the first shock of care as a mirror by a sword-stroke?  Is it a painted mask, washed colourless by the first rain of autumn tears?  Is it a flower, so tender that it must perish miserably in the frosty rime of earliest winter?  Is love the accident of youth, the complement of a fresh complexion, the corollary of a light step, the physical concomitant of swelling pulses and unstrained sinews?”

Keyork Arabian laughed softly.  Unorna was grave and looked up into his face, resting her chin upon her hand.

“If that is love, if that is the idol of your shrine, the vision of your dreams, the familiar genius of your earthly paradise, why then, indeed, he who worships by your side, and who would share the habitation of your happiness, must wear Absalom’s anointed curls and walk with Agag’s delicate step.  What matter if he be but a half-witted puppet?  He is fair.  What matter if he be foolish, faithless, forgetful, inconstant, changeable as the tide of the sea?  He is young.  His youth shall cover all his deficiencies and wipe out all his sins!  Imperial love, monarch and despot of the human soul, is become the servant of boys for the wage of a girl’s first thoughtless kiss.  If that is love let it perish out of the world, with the bloom of the wood violet in spring, with the flutter of the bright moth in June, with the song of the nightingale and the call of the mocking-bird, with all things that are fair and lovely and sweet but for a few short days.  If that is love, why then love never made a wound, nor left a scar, nor broke a heart in this easy-going rose-garden of a world.  The rose blooms, blows, fades and withers and feels nothing.  If that is love, we may yet all develop into passionless promoters of a flat and unprofitable commonwealth; the earth may yet be changed to a sweetmeat for us to feed on, and the sea to sugary lemonade for us to drink, as the mad philosopher foretold, and we may yet all be happy after love has left us.”

Unorna smiled, while he laughed again.

“Good,” she said.  “You tell me what love is not, but you have not told me what it is.”