§ 87
The only true human love drama is one that has an organic relation to a whole lifetime of love. To the Don Juan type of ravisher of virgins the love episode, as part of a life drama with unity in it, does not exist. He satisfies himself with beginnings, with staking out foundations for other people to build and live in the homes constructed by their hands, not realizing, for his imagination is poor and weak, how soon his little stakes will be pulled up and thrown away by the first workers on the house, even if they do not entirely reject his plan’s outlines.
The only true love of a man for a woman is that in which he studies her reactions to his own behaviour, and cultivates that power of his, which is the innate power residing in any whole man, to control the entire emotional life of one woman, let her intellectual life be what it may.
“Why,” the man of the world may say, “should any man be satisfied with only one woman, when, if he has personal attractiveness, he may find hundreds of women ready to fall into his arms, and may drink the love life to the dregs?” What Enobarbus said of Cleopatra may be said of any woman, if she be developed by a man, as she should be.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies....
Woman’s infinite variety, supposed in Shakespeare’s day to have been embodied in the arch-dispenser of delights, Cleopatra, was a rare phenomenon; but the modern view is that the variety is present in every woman, just as the fourscore keys are in every piano. In this sense, then, woman’s infinite variety is dependent on man’s control of her emotional reactions, no woman being full woman unless and until she has been completely manned.