Othmar

by Ouida

'These digressions are admirable in their way, but I must recall the Court to the subject before them. Someone is bringing in allusions to cookery, flat-irons, and the bourgeois ideal which I have always understood was M. Thiers. They are certainly, however interesting, wholly irrelevant to the theme which we are met here to discuss. Let us pass on to the question next upon the list. If no one can define Love except as devotion, that definition suits so few cases that we must accept its existence without definition, and proceed to inquire what are its characteristics and its results.'

'The first is exigence and the second is ennui.'

'No, the first is sympathy and the second is happiness.'

'That is very commonplace. Its chief characteristic appears to me to be an extremely rapid transition from a state of imbecile adoration to a state of irritable fatigue. I speak from the masculine point of view.'

'And I, from the feminine, classify it rather as a transition (regretted but inevitable) from amiable illusions and generous concessions to a wounded sense of offence at ingratitude.'

'We are coming to the Italian coltellate! You both only mean that in love, as in everything else which is human, people who expect too much are disappointed; disappointment is always irritation; it may even become malignity if it take a very severe form.'

'You seem all of you to have glided into an apology for inconstancy. Is that inevitable to love?'

'It looks as if it were; or, at all events, its forerunner, fatigue, is so.'

'You treat love as you would treat a man who asked you to paint his portrait, whilst you persisted in painting that of his shadow instead. The shadow which dogs his footsteps is not himself.'

'It is cast by himself, so it is a part of him.'