in other words, love is an affair of two, and is only for two that can be as | quick, as constant in intercommunication as are sun and earth, through the | cloud or face to face. They take their breath of life from one another in signs | of affection, proofs of faithfulness, incentives to admiration. Thus it is with | men and women in love's good season. But a solitary soul dragging a log must | make the log a God to rejoice in the burden. That is not love. |  | no: the living world. I am sure it is our duty to love it. I am sure we weaken | ourselves if we do not. If I did not, I should be looking on mist, hearing a | perpetual boom instead of music. I remember hearding Mr. Whitford say that | cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb;s feathers; and it seems | to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as | they have made it for themselves  |  | she knew her mind's injustice. it was her case, her lamentable case--the | impatient panic-stricken nerves of a captured wild creature which cried for | help. She exaggerated her sufferings to get strength to throw them off, and | lost it in the recognition that they were exaggerated: and out of the conflict | issued recklessness, with a cry as wild as any coming of madness; for she did | not blush in saying to herself. "If some one loved me!" Before hearing of | Constantia, she had mused upon liberty as a virgin Goddess--men were out of her | thoughts; even the figure of a rescuer, if one dawned in her mind, was more | angel than hero. That fair childish maidenliness had ceased. With her body | straining in her dragon's grasp, with the savour of loathing, unable to | contend, unable to speak aloud, she began to speak to herself, and all the | health of her nature made her outcry womanly: "If I were loved!"--not for the | sake of love, but for free breathing; and her utterance of it was to insure | life and enduringness to the wish, as the yearning of a mother on a drowning | ship is to get her infant to shore. "If some noble gentleman could see me as I | am and not disdain to aid me! Oh! to be caught up out of this prison of thorns | and brambles. I cannot tear my own way out. I am a coward. My cry for help | confesses that. A beckoning of a finger would change me, I believe. I could fly | bleeding and through hootings to a comrade. Oh! a comrade! I do not want a | lover. I should find another Egoist, not so bad, but enough to make me take a | breath like death. I could follow a soldier, like poor Sally or Molly. He | stakes his life for his country, and a woman may be proud of the worst of men | who do that. Constantia met a soldier. Perhaps she prayed and her prayer was | answered. She did ill. But, oh, how I love her for it! His name was Harry | Oxford. Papa would call him her Perseus. She must have felt that there was no | explaining what she suffered. She had only to act, to plunge. First she fixed | her mind on Harry Oxford. To be able to speak his name and see him awaiting | her, must have been relief, a reprieve. She did not waver, she cut the links, | she signed herself over. Oh, brave girl! what do you think of me? But I hav no | Harry Whitford, I am alone. Let anything be said against women; we must be very | bad to have such bad things written of us: only, say this, that to ask them tos | ign themselves over by oath and ceremony, because of an ignorant promise, to | the man they have been mistaken in, is ... it is--" the sudden consciousness | that she had put another name for Oxford, struck her a buffet, drowning her in | crimson. |  |