or woman elects to stand out of the common ruck and say:  “I refuse to live in a chaos of uncertainties—­I will endeavour to know why my particular atom of self is considered a necessary, if infinitesimal, part of the Universe,”—­such an one is looked upon with either distrust or derision.  In matters of love especially, where the most ill-assorted halves persist in fitting themselves together as if they could ever make a perfect whole, a woman is considered foolish if she gives her affections where it is ’not expedient’—­and a man is looked upon as having ’ruined his career’ if he allows a great passion to dominate him, instead of a calm, well-weighed, respectable sort of sentiment which has its fitting end in an equally calm, well-weighed, respectable marriage.  These are the laws and observances of social order, excellent in many respects, but frequently responsible for a great bulk of the misery attendant upon many forms of human relationship.  It is not, however, possible to the ordinary mind to realise that somewhere and somehow, every two component parts of a whole must come together, sooner or later, and that herein may be found the key to most of the great love tragedies of the world.  The wrong halves mated,—­the right halves finding each other out and rushing together recklessly and inopportunely because of the resistless Law which draws them together,—­this is the explanation of many a life’s disaster and despair, as well as of many a life’s splendid attainment and victory.  And the trouble or the triumph, whichever it be, will never be lessened till human beings learn that in love, which is the greatest and most divine Force on earth or in heaven, the Soul, not the body, must first be considered, and that no one can fulfil the higher possibilities of his or her nature, till each individual unit is conjoined with that only other portion of itself which is as one with it in thought and in the intuitive comprehension of its higher needs.

I knew all this well enough, and had known it for years, and it was hardly necessary for me to dwell upon it, as I sat alone in my cabin that night, too restless to sleep, and, almost too uneasy even to think.  What had happened to me was simply that I had by a curious chance or series of chances been brought into connection again with the individual Soul of a man whom I had known and loved ages ago.  To the psychist, such a circumstance does not seem as strange as it is to the great majority of people who realise no greater force than Matter, and who have no comprehension of Spirit, and no wish to comprehend it, though even the dullest of these often find themselves brought into contact with persons whom they feel they have met and known before, and are unable to understand why they receive such an impression.  In my case I had not only to consider the one particular identity which seemed so closely connected with my own—­but also the other individuals with whom I had become more or less reluctantly associated,—­Catherine