In truth,
however, the lack has been in himself all this time. He had yet to learn
what loving indeed meant: and he loves the thirteenth, not because she
is pre-eminent beyond the rest, but because she has come to him at the
moment when that 'lore of loving' has been revealed. Had any of those
earlier maidens fallen on the happy conjunction, they would, doubtless,
have proved no less loveworthy, and seemed no less that 'ideal' which
they have since become, one may be sure, for some other illuminated
soul.
Of course, some find that love early--the baby-love, whom one never
marries, and then the faithful service. Probably it happens so with the
majority of men; for it is, I think, especially to the artist nature
that it comes thus late. Living so vividly within the circle of its own
experience, by its very constitution so necessarily egoistic, the
latter, more particularly in its early years, is always a Narcissus,
caring for nought or none except in so much as they reflect back its own
beauty or its own dreams. The face such a youth looks for, as he turns
the coy captured head to meet his glance, is, quite unconsciously, his
own, and the 'ideal' he seeks is but the perfect mirror. Yet it is not
that mirror he marries after all: for when at last he has come to know
what that word--one so distasteful, so 'soiled' to his ear 'with all
ignoble' domesticity--what that word 'wife' really expresses, he has
learnt, too, to discredit those cynical guides of his youth who love so
well to write Ego as the last word of human nature.
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