The Incomplete Amorist

"But can you feel that for two--"

"Oh, bother," said Vernon, "every sort of fool-fancy calls itself love. There's the pleasure of pursuit--there's vanity, there's the satisfaction of your own amour-propre, there's desire, there's intellectual attraction, there's the love of beauty, there's the artist's joy in doing what you know you can do well, and getting a pretty woman for sole audience. You might feel one or two or twenty of these things for one woman, and one or two or twenty different ones for another. But if you mean do you love two women in the same way, I say no. Thank Heaven it's new every time."

"It mayn't be the same way," said Temple, "but it's the same thing to you--if you feel you can't bear to give either of them up."

"Well, then, you can marry one and keep on with the other. Or be 'friends' with both and marry neither. Or cut the whole show and go to the Colonies."

"Then you have to choose between being unhappy or being a blackguard."

"My good chap, that's the situation in which our emotions are always landing us--our confounded emotions and the conventions of Society."

"And how are you to know whether the thing's love--or--all those other things?"

"You don't know: you can't know till it's too late for your knowing to matter. Marriage is like spinach. You can't tell that you hate it till you've tried it. Only--"

"Well?"

"I think I've heard it said," Vernon voiced his own sudden conviction, very carelessly, "that love wants to give and passion wants to take. Love wants to possess the beloved object--and to make her happy. Desire wants possession too--but the happiness is to be for oneself; and if there's not enough happiness for both so much the worse. If I'm talking like a Sunday School book you've brought it on yourself."

"I like it," said Temple.

"Well, since the Dissenting surplice has fallen on me, I'll give you a test. I believe that the more you love a woman the less your thoughts will dwell on the physical side of the business. You want to take care of her."

"Yes," said Temple.

"And then often," Vernon went on, surprised to find that he wanted to help the other in his soul-searchings, "if a chap's not had much to do with women--the women of our class, I mean--he gets a bit dazed with them. They're all so nice, confound them. If a man felt he was falling in love with two women at once, and he had the tiresome temperament that takes these things seriously, it wouldn't be a bad thing for him to go away into the country, and moon about for a few weeks, and see which was the one that bothered his brain most. Then he'd know where he was, and not be led like a lamb to the slaughter by the wrong one. They can't both get him, you know, unless his intentions are strictly dishonourable."