“There is no use in wasting words, Cousin Charles; you never can persuade me that men love more devotedly than women.”
“How can you be so unreasonable, Anne? I only want to convince you that affection being an essential part of woman’s nature, she cannot help loving something or somebody all her life. The most she does, even in her most intense devotion, is to individualize the general sentiment which pervades her character; but when men love, they actually take up a new nature, and concentrate upon it all their strength of mind and force of character.”
“You have certainly a droll method of reasoning, cousin; because women are loving creatures, therefore they cannot love as well as the rougher sex.”
“You are willful, Anne, and are determined not to understand me. I mean that love is usually a habitude with women, while with men, if it exists at all, it is a positive, determinate thing—a graft, as it were, upon their sturdy natures, and partaking therefore of the strength of the stock which nourishes it.”
“How can you say so when men are always in love, from the time they quit the nursery until they are gray-headed, or married?”
“Such attachments are mere fancies.”
“Pray, how is one to distinguish between a fancy and a fact in so delicate a matter?”
“It is difficult to decide at first, because in their inceptive state they are much alike; but time is the true test. A fancy, a mere intoxication of the senses, is scarce worth talking about; but in a genuine manly love there is a depth, a fervor, a disinterestedness, a devotion, such as woman can never feel—nay, which they can rarely appreciate.”
“Heresy—rank heresy—Cousin Charles. I appeal to Uncle Lorimer, who has heard our whole discussion, if you do not deserve excommunication with ‘bell, book and candle,’ for holding such opinions.”
The cousins were sitting together in the twilight, and, as the shadows of evening deepened around them, the light of the soft-coal fire in the polished grate gave a beautifully cheerful look of home comfort to the pleasant apartment. An old gentleman, whose silver hair glittered in the fire-light, had been sitting in the chimney-nook, and, thus appealed to by his merry niece, he smiled good-humoredly as he replied—