Windows of Love

so who were wise enough or fortunate enough to follow the earliestpromptings of their own hearts, and not to be ashamed of that divinestand deepest of human intuitions, love at first sight.

How very subtle this intuition is, we can only guess in part by theapparent capriciousness and incomprehensibility of its occasionalaction. We know that some men and women fall in love easily, whileothers are only moved to love by some very special and singularcombination of peculiarities. We know that one man is readily stirred byevery pretty face he sees, while another man can only be roused byintellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We know that sometimes wemeet people possessing every virtue and grace under heaven, and yet forsome unknown and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in lovewith them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments. I don’t,of course, for a moment accept the silly romantic notion that men andwomen fall in love only once in their lives, or that each one of us hassomewhere on earth his or her exact affinity, whom we must sooner orlater meet or else die unsatisfied. Almost every healthy normal man orwoman has probably fallen in love over and over again in the course of alifetime (except in case of very early marriage), and could easily finddozens of persons with whom they would be capable of falling in loveagain if due occasion offered. We are not all created in pairs, like theExchequer tallies, exactly intended to fit into one another’s minoridiosyncrasies. Men and women as a rule very sensibly fall in love withone another in the particular places and the particular societies theyhappen to be cast among. A man at Ashby-de-la-Zouch does not hunt theworld over to find his pre-established harmony at Paray-le-Monial or atDenver, Colorado. But among the women he actually meets, a vast numberare purely indifferent to him; only one or two, here and there, strikehim in the light of possible wives, and only one in the last resort(outside Salt Lake City) approves herself to his inmost nature as theactual wife of his final selection.

Now this very indifference to the vast mass of our fellow-countrymen orfellow-countrywomen, this extreme pitch of selective preference in thehuman species, is just one mark of our extraordinary specialisation, onestamp and token of our high supremacy. The brutes do not so pick andchoose, though even there, as Darwin has shown, selection plays a largepart (for the very butterflies are coy, and must be wooed and won). Itis only in the human race itself that selection descends into suchminute, such subtle, such indefinable discriminations. Why should auniversal and common impulse have in our case these special limits? Whyshould we be by nature so fastidious and so diversely affected? Surelyfor some good and sufficient purpose. No deep-seated want of our complexlife would be so narrowly restricted without a law and a meaning.Sometimes we can in part explain its conditions. Here, we see thatbeauty plays a great _role_; there, we recognise the importance ofstrength, of manner, of grace, of moral qualities. Vivacity, as Mr.Galton justly remarks, is one of the most powerful among humanattractions, and often accounts for what might otherwise seem