"Poorly lived, and poorly died;
Poorly buried, and nobody cried."

Broach this subject of love to a circle after dinner, round a good fire. Everybody laughs! The young men and maidens look conscious. What they feel is as real to them as pleasure in music they hear; in the taste of wine. Yes, and far more—while it lasts. Some elders profess scorn, because their minds are so choked with years' dust of daily cares they have forgotten how they, too, once believed love real—while it lasted! Ay! there's the rub. You are told—truthfully—that love is strong as death: inconstant as every breeze. Some declare, for them—

"In the whole wide world there was but one."

Other as honest souls confess their hearts have known, since first love, "many other lodgers." This seems clear, love is real to those who give it! Only they who care more to get it, call it moonshine and naughty names. Like figures on an Egyptian monument, each follows one who looks at another. Never one scorned, but has rejected a third.

"As Pan loved Echo, Echo loved the satyr,
The satyr Lyda—and so the three went weeping."

Miss Quiller Couch wishes Love were a pleasing fiction.

"Pleasing fiction," forsooth; would that it were! It is a very real game, and the rules thereof are practical. I know it, for verily I myself have suffered. Let it not be understood, however, that it is as a "practical, real lover" that I have suffered. Not at all. It is that this order of beings walks abroad, and I am not of it, and I meet it, and I am pained, and I feel sorry. Could Love be but a pleasing fiction, how comfortable to sit aside and contemplate it—a trifle to talk of, a dainty to dally with, a joy to the juvenescent, a blessing to the book-writer, yet never an inconvenience. But it is a practical reality, and it has great effects. Why, I have seen good, healthy people, quite nice-tempered people, brought to a shadow by it and churned into so many pounds of incompetent irritability; so exacting about trifles, so fidgetty about catching the mail, and so careless of the health of the uninteresting majority. There was one man I knew down in a village, and he fell in love with a pretty girl—they mostly do that—but she would have nothing to say to him; and after every rejected proposal he went straight home and made a three-legged stool (he was a carpenter by trade, or perhaps it might have affected him differently). He was what one might call an importunate man, for he proposed nineteen times in all, and nineteen three-legged stools stood as silent witnesses of his importunity. He changed houses after the twelfth, for he found a sad joy in contemplating his handiwork as he sat at his lonely meals, and his first sitting-room was only twelve feet by eight. Finally, either because of his importunity, or because she disliked the thought that the wordless witnesses might fall into unsympathetic hands, the girl married the man, and scrubbed the stools nicely with soap and sand, and grew quite fond of them. And only once did she regret her surrender; and that was when it flashed across her one day that twenty would have been a prettier number: but she stifled that pain as years went on, and grew happy. Then there was Dante's love for Beatrice, which caused him to sit down and write such a lot. Most remarkable persons seem to have produced something rather excellent as the outcome of their love. I know a naturally lazy and slightly dingy boy who endured a nice clean collar every day, and it cut his neck, and his soul abhorred it, for he told me so; and he spent from seventy-five to ninety minutes over his toilet every morning, while he loved, and he knew he could dress in four minutes and a quarter, for he had done it often. Love was a great beautifier. In this case I must admit that the lover suffered more than we outsiders, except that he became irritable in his cleanliness. Love should not be scorned, even if it is real and sometimes uncomfortably practical. It is very beautiful, and lovers make a pretty sight. What I protest is, that all creatures should be lovers—or none. It is the half-and-half state of the world which is irksome.

Morley Roberts hopes Love will some day be a pleasing reality