CHAPTER XXXII
OF INTIMATE INTERCOURSE
The greatest happiness that love can give—'tis first joining your hand to the hand of a woman you love.
The happiness of gallantry is quite otherwise—far more real, and far more subject to ridicule.
In passion-love intimate intercourse is not so much perfect delight itself, as the last step towards it.
But how depict a delight, which leaves no memories behind?
Mortimer returned from a long voyage in fear and trembling; he adored Jenny, but Jenny had not answered his letters. On his arrival in London, he mounts his horse and goes off to find her at her country home. When he gets there, she is walking in the park; he runs up to her, with beating heart, meets her and she offers him her hand and greets him with emotion; he sees that she loves him. Roaming together along the glades of the park, Jenny's dress became entangled in an acacia bush. Later on Mortimer won her; but Jenny was faithless. I maintain to him that Jenny never loved him and he quotes, as proof of her love, the way in which she received him at his return from the Continent; but he could never give me the slightest details of it. Only he shudders visibly directly he sees an acacia bush: really, it is the only distinct remembrance he succeeded in preserving of the happiest moment of his life.[1]
A sensitive and open man, a former chevalier, confided to me this evening (in the depth of our craft buffeted by a high sea on the Lago di Garda[2]) the history of his loves, which I in my turn shall not confide to the public. But I feel myself in a position to conclude from them that the day of intimate intercourse is like those fine days in May, a critical period for the fairest flowers, a moment which can be fatal and wither in an instant the fairest hopes.