“It would depend who I was at the moment.”
“Oh, nonsense—be serious.”
“But I am. It would depend, at all events, on what kind of love I felt most in need of at the moment—one’s needs are so different from day to day. Old loves give us certain satisfactions, and new loves give us certain other satisfactions.”
“Well, tell me what those different satisfactions are.”
“Old Love brings you the sense of security, of shelter, of peace; it has the warm-home charm of kindly long-known things, the beauty of beautiful habit, the nimbus and the authority of religion. In fact, it has all that belongs to the word ‘old’ used in the laudatory sense. Its value is the value of the known—whereas the value of new love is largely the value of the unknown.”
“You mean that the value of new love lies largely in its newness.”
“Certainly. Mere novelty, as the world admits on every hand, has real value; the value of refreshment, at least. In fact, novelty is the truest friend of old feeling, as it makes us feel the old feelings over again—which might hardly happen without its assistance. Besides, love is even more an imaginative than an emotional need, and the new love speaks to the imagination. Love needs wonder to live on quite as much as secure affection. The new love appeals to one’s sense of strangeness, one’s spirit of adventure. As we stand silent upon that peak in Darien—who knows, we say to our hushed expectant hearts, who knows but that this is Eldorado at last....”
“We only say that when the old was not Eldorado,” put in the Sphinx.
“O of course!” I admitted hastily.