In his own powerful but subconscious fashion Aaron realized this.  He was a musician.  And hence even his deepest ideas:  were not word-ideas, his very thoughts were not composed of words and ideal concepts.  They too, his thoughts and his ideas, were dark and invisible, as electric vibrations are invisible no matter how many words they may purport.  If I, as a word-user, must translate his deep conscious vibrations into finite words, that is my own business.  I do but make a translation of the man.  He would speak in music.  I speak with words.

The inaudible music of his conscious soul conveyed his meaning in him quite as clearly as I convey it in words:  probably much more clearly.  But in his own mode only:  and it was in his own mode only he realised what I must put into words.  These words are my own affair.  His mind was music.

Don’t grumble at me then, gentle reader, and swear at me that this damned fellow wasn’t half clever enough to think all these smart things, and realise all these fine-drawn-out subtleties.  You are quite right, he wasn’t, yet it all resolved itself in him as I say, and it is for you to prove that it didn’t.

In his now silent, maskless state of wordless comprehension, he knew that he had never wanted to surrender himself utterly to Lottie:  nor to his mother:  nor to anybody.  The last extreme of self-abandon in love was for him an act of false behaviour.  His own nature inside him fated him not to take this last false step, over the edge of the abyss of selflessness.  Even if he wanted to, he could not.  He might struggle on the edge of the precipice like an assassin struggling with his own soul, but he could not conquer.  For, according to all the current prejudice and impulse in one direction, he too had believed that the final achievement, the consummation of human life, was this flinging oneself over the precipice, down the bottomless pit of love.  Now he realised that love, even in its intensest, was only an attribute of the human soul:  one of its incomprehensible gestures.  And to fling down the whole soul in one gesture of finality in love was as much a criminal suicide as to jump off a church-tower or a mountain-peak.  Let a man give himself as much as he liked in love, to seven thousand extremities, he must never give himself away.  The more generous and the more passionate a soul, the more it gives itself.  But the more absolute remains the law, that it shall never give itself away.  Give thyself, but give thyself not away.  That is the lesson written at the end of the long strange lane of love.

The idee fixe of today is that every individual shall not only give himself, but shall achieve the last glory of giving himself away.  And since this takes two—­you can’t even make a present of yourself unless you’ve got somebody to receive the present; since this last extra-divine act takes two people to perform it, you’ve got to take into count not only your giver but your receiver.  Who is going to be the giver and who the receiver.