What it really wishes no lover seems able to say. As a matter of fact,
The endless task which the lover is ever attempting is a search for a
formula for the summation of an infinite series of which love is the
variable.--Few lovers seem to understand this.
* * *
To kindle aspiration in her lover, a woman herself need not be aspiring.
For,
Whatever the talents of a man, they are stimulated by contact with woman.
Since
An elevating influence seems to radiate from women: we have but to come
into the light of their countenances for our own faces to shine as the
sun. Indeed,
Physicists may talk as they like, but lovers know a more subtle and a
more potent force than any yet revealed to them. It has not yet been
named; but for the present it might be called "psychicity". (3)
(3) Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks of "celebricity". See "Over the Tea
Cup"
* * *
If you wish to ascertain the relationship of a youthful pair, watch their
eyes. For
Simulation is difficult to the eye.
* * *
When the idol into which a woman has converted her lover is dethroned,
she still worships her remembrance of her god, and puts together and
treasures the broken pieces.
When the idol into which has converted his loved one is dethroned, he
generally changes his creed.
* * *
A circumpsecting lover is a woman's abhorrence: as a calculating
mistress is a man's.
* * *
Let a lover but put himself into the hands of his mistress, and he is
safe. Since
The man she really loves, a woman will shield through thick and thin,
through right and wrong. For,
Concerning a man, the only question a woman asks is, not, "Is he right or
wrong?" but, "Is he mine or another's?"--We men therefore
Leave a woman to get her lover out of a scrape.
* * *
It is to be feared that the men and women who love but once and forever
are not usually to be found outside of romances.
With women, love is a river, ever-flowing, from the brook in girlhood,
(4) to the estuary of womanhood. Like a river, too,
Woman's love is fed by all the streams it meets. On the other hand,
With man, love is a geyser.
(4) Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet.
--Longfellow, "Maidenhood"
* * *
The languishing lover has gone out of date; he has been replaced by the
diverting one. And the change is significant of much:
The early nineteenth-century maid pretended to ignorance; the early
twentieth-century maid to omniscience.