§ 73
But no whole man will be other than fired by this consent to test. If he is cloyed by it, his being so demonstrates his inadequacy; it proves his anesthesia, his insensibility, his blindness to the future possibilities of complete binary love-living.
To him this failure of his, this revulsion of feeling at the precise moment when he has entered the very lists of love, this slacker’s attitude, seems not a desertion on his part, not a failure of his, but a sudden loss of charm on her part. She is, upon trial, not what he had expected and longed for. But the failure, the loss of charm are his, not hers. He ought to be the charmer. He ought to have been informed that it is his privilege and power to attain the pleasure of putting his woman into another world of sheer exuberant joy—that his own pleasure in life can be attained by no other means; and that the consent of the woman to be his wife is a consent not to take one step with him, and then have him vanish, but to travel the path of life-love to its end—a path that is long and joyous, a path from which no seeing man, no man with eyes of love, can ever wish to depart. For with him is happiness personified and before him and leading him on is light.