"You must allow us to be the judges of that," I replied.
"Well, but," he said, "anyhow you can't deny that such illusions are common. What lover ever saw his mistress as she really is?"
"No," I said, "I don't deny that. But at the same time I should affirm that the truer the love, the less the illusion. In what is commonly called love, no doubt, the physical element is the predominant, or even the only one present; and in that case there may be illusion to an indefinite extent. But the love which is based upon years of common experience, which has grown with the growth of the whole person, in power and intelligence and insight, which has survived countless disappointments and surmounted countless obstacles, the love of husband and wife, the love, as we began by saying, of friends—such love, as Browning says boldly, 'is never blind.' And such love, I suppose you will admit, does exist, however rarely?"
"Yes, I suppose so."
"Well, then, in the case of such a love, it is the object as it really is, not as it has been falsely fashioned by the imagination, that is directly apprehended as good. And you cannot fairly say that its Good is merely the ideal of the lover transferred to the person of the loved."
"But," objected Leslie, "though that may be so, yet still the Good, that Is the person, does inhere in an alien stuff—the body."
"But," I replied,"is the body alien? Is it not rather an expression of the person? as essential, somehow or other, as the soul?"
"Certainly!" cried Ellis. "Give me the flesh, the flesh!
"'Not with my soul, Love!—bid no soul like mine
Lap thee around nor leave the poor sense room!