When he beckons she must answer. When he says "come," she must not stay. She must be all things to him—friend, comrade, sweetheart, wife. When the infinite meaning of her dream slowly dawns upon her, is it strange that she trembles and grows pale?
Soon or late it comes to all. Sometimes there is terror at the sudden meeting and Love often comes in the guise of a friend. But always, it brings joy which is sorrow, and pain which is happiness—gladness which is never content.
A woman wants a man to love her in the way she loves him; a man wants a woman to love him in the way he loves her, and because the thing is impossible, neither is satisfied.
The Strongest Passion
Man's emotion is far stronger than woman's. His feeling, when it is deep, is a force which a woman may but dimly understand. The strongest passion of a man's life is his love for his sweetheart; woman's greatest love is lavished upon her child.
"One is the lover and one is the loved." Sometimes the positions are reversed, to the misery of all concerned, but normally, man is the lover. He wins love by pleading for it, and there is no way by which a woman may more surely lose it, for while woman's pity is closely akin to Love, man's pity is a poor relation who wears Love's cast-off clothes.
There are two other ways in which a woman loses her lover. One is by marrying him and the other by retaining him as her friend. If she can keep him as her friend, she never believes in his love, and husbands and lovers are often two very different possessions.
A man's heart is an office desk, wherein tender episodes are pigeon-holed for future reference. If he is too busy to look them over, they are carried off later in Father Time's junk-wagon, like other and more profane history.
All the isolated loves of a woman's life are woven into a single continuous fabric. Love itself is the thing she needs and the man who offers it seldom matters much. Man loves and worships woman, but woman loves love. Were it not so, there would be no actor's photograph upon the matinée girl's dressing-table, and no bit of tender verse would be fastened to her cushion with a hat pin, while she herself was fancy free.
Gift and Giver