one lighter than the other. Say it is a poor nature and a great nature; say it is a strong passion and a passing caprice; say it is a profound temperament and a shallow one; in some way or other the scales are almost always imperfectly adjusted. When they are quite even—which happens once out of a million times—then there is a great and felicitous love; an exquisite and imperishable sympathy.'
'But who holds these magical scales? It is the holder who is responsible.'
'The holder is Fate.'
'Chance.'
'Opportunity.'
'Destiny.'
'Predestination.'
'Circumstance.'
'Affinity.'
'Affinity can only hold them on that millionth occasion when a perfect love is the result.'
'Usually Chance and Circumstance fill the scales, and they are two roguish boys who like to make mischief. Affinity is the angel; perhaps the only angel by which poor humanity is ever led into an earthly paradise.'
'That is worthy of Philip Sydney.'
'Or of the Earl of Lytton.'
'And is so charming that we will not risk having anything coarse or commonplace said after it. Let us adjourn the debate till to-morrow.'
'Nay, Majesté; let us pass to another question: What is the greatest dilemma of Love?'
'To have to galvanise itself into an imitation of life when it is dead.'
'Is it worse to be the last to love, or the first to grow tired?'
'In the former case one's self-esteem is hurt; in the latter one's conscience.'
'The wounds of conscience are sooner cured than those of vanity.'
'Whoever loves most loves longest.'
'No, whoever is least loved loves longest.'
'How is that to be explained?'
'The contradictions of human nature will usually suffice to explain everything.'
'But there may be another explanation also; the one who is least loved is the least cloyed, and the most apprehensive of alteration.'
'Love is best worked with egotism, as gold is worked with alloy.'
'Surely the essential loveliness of love is self-sacrifice?'
'That is a theory. In fact, the only satisfactory love is one which gives and receives mutual pleasure. When there is self-sacrifice on one side the pleasure also is one-sided.'
'Then the revellers of the Decamerone knew more of love than Dante?'
'That is approaching a theme too full of dangers to be discussed—the difference between physical and spiritual love. I do not consider that you have satisfactorily answered the previous question: What is the greatest dilemma of Love?'
'When, in the open doorway of its house of life, one passion, grown old and grey, passes out limping, and meets another passion newly come thither, and laughing, with the blossoms of April in its sunny hair.'
'What a sonnet in a sentence! What is Love to do in such a case? Shall he detain the grey-haired crippled guest?'
'He cannot. For the more he shall endeavour to retain him the thinner and paler and more impalpable will the withered and lame passion grow.'
'And the newly-come one?'
'Oh, he will enter, smiling and strong, and will fill the house with the music of his pipe and the odour of his hyacinths for awhile, until he too shall in turn pass outwards, when his music is silent and his flowers are dead.'
'Is Love then always to be mourned like Lycidas?'
'He is in no sense like Lycidas; Lycidas died, a perfect youth. Love, with time, grows pale and wan and feeble, and a very shadow of itself, before it dies.'
'There are some who say, if he have not immortality he is not Love at all; but only Caprice, Vanity, Wantonness, or faithless Fancy, masquerading in his dress.'
'How can that be immortal which has no existence without mortal forms?'
'Here is one of the notes of modernity! The sad note of self-consciousness; the consciousness of mortality and of insignificance; the memento mori which is always with us. And yet we do not respect death, we only hate it and fear it; because it will make of us a dreary, ugly, putrid thing. That is all we know. And the knowledge dulls even our diversions. We can be gouailleur, but we cannot be gay if we would.'
'There is too great a tendency here to use gros mots—devotion, death, immortality, &c. They are a mistake in a disquisition which wishes to be witty. They are like the use of cannon in an opera. But I think, even in France, the secret of lightness of wit is lost. We have all read too much German philosophy.'
'We will endeavour to be gayer to-morrow. We will wake all the shades of Brantôme.'
'Well,' their sovereign declared, as she rose, 'we have held our Court to little avail; some pretty things have been said, and some stupid ones, but we have arrived at no definite conclusion, unless it be this: that love is only respectable when it is unhappy, and ceases to exist the moment it is contented.'
'A cruel sentence, Madame!'
'Human nature is cruel; so is Time.'
When the sun had wholly set, and only a warm yellow glow through all the west told that its glory had passed, the Court broke up for that day, and strolled in picturesque groups towards the house as the chimes of the clock tower told the hour of dinner.
'How very characteristic of our time and of our world,' said the queen, as she drew her ivory-hued, violet-laden skirts over the smooth turf. 'We have talked for three whole hours of Love, and nobody has ever thought of mentioning Marriage as his kinsman!'
'He who has had the honour to marry you might well have done so, had he been here to-day,' murmured a courtier on her right.
She laughed, looking up into the deep-blue evening sky through the network of green leaves:
'But he was not here, so he was saved the difficulty of choice between an insincerity and a rudeness, always a very serious dilemma to him. Marriage is the grave of love, my dear friend, even if he be buried with roses for his pillow and lilies for his shroud.'
'But Love may be stronger than Death. Solomon has said so.'
'What is stronger than Death? Death is stronger than all of us. Tout cela pourrira. It is the despair of the lover and the poet, and the consolation of the beggar when the rich and the beautiful go past him.'
She spoke with a certain melancholy, and absently struck the tall heads of seeding grasses with her ivory sceptre.
'We have only wearied you, I fear,' said her companion, with contrition and mortification.
'That
