"What is love? Answer: 'I don't know.' Love has been called a piece of roguery on the part of Nature. I don't believe that, for I know that Nature has neither made itself nor can it think out pieces of roguery. But if we accept that proposition, we descend to zoology, and that I do not wish to do. I do not share the theoretical veneration for woman which my contemporaries cherish; on the other hand, I instinctively place her higher than ourselves. She seems to me to be formed out of finer material than we men, but I may be wrong, for she seems to be furnished with more animal functions than we are. If I were a theosophist, I should believe she was only a kind of intermediary chrysalis stage on the way to man, only a temporary manifestation, out of which love, i.e. man's love, creates in, her possibilities of being and seeming. When he finds this really lifeless form of existence and breathes his immortal breath into it, he shares the Creator's joy on the seventh day. The process of refining, which his coarser substance hindered him bringing about in his own soul, he brings about in hers, and through reaction—no! it is too difficult for me to explain; it is like dividing an angle into three equal parts. Anyhow, the fact is certain, and my story is an illustration of it, that when a man is deceived in his love as he always is, his whole being revolts against the government of the world, which seems to him to have condescended to mock at his holiest possession, the holiest thing in all creation. If Providence is consonant with such deceit and such coarse jesting then he discovers a devil where he thought he had seen a good angel. After that what shall he trust, what shall he value, at what shall he not make a grimace? And when after marriage the veil falls, and like Adam and Eve they are naked and ashamed, then even the most unbelieving is conscious of something resembling the Fall. Then comes a fresh error and they think they have deceived each other, which they have not done. So they scourge each other for crimes which neither has committed. A second deception follows the first."
They were again silent. Then the postmaster gave the conversation another turn and descended to the earth. "You can guess that I, at any rate, recognise the lady of your story. She lives in her own little house, here on the island by the shore."
"Yes she does! I know her, and I was quarantine doctor at Hven when she was captured. Now that she is elderly she has renewed her acquaintance with me, and it is from her own mouth that I heard the story. She has been in love countless times, and declares that every time she believed she had found the right man who had been predestined for her from the foundation of the world."
"Does not reason feel its helplessness before such riddles, riddles of every day?"
"Yes and therefore ... yes, next Saturday you shall hear another story, and I think we shall approach the riddle a little more closely, i.e. we shall find its insolubility more strongly proved."
"I shall be glad to hear it. But why don't you have your stories printed?"
"Because I have been a doctor, and a woman's doctor. I have no right to reveal what I have heard in my official capacity. Sometimes I should like to be a writer with a prescriptive right to find material for his art in men's lives and destinies; but that is a calling and a task which is denied to me."
"Very well; good night till next Saturday."
When Saturday evening came round, the two old men sat in the corner room with their toddy and tobacco and a large pile of manuscript on the table. The postmaster looked a little nervously at it, as a child might at a family book of sermons.
"We can give two evenings to it," said the doctor soothingly.