TO any sensitive man, not yet armored by the indifference that comes of being married himself, there is cause for apprehension in the prospect of meeting for the first time that person, male or female, whom somebody he knows and loves has recently agreed to marry. The event, when it comes, is unavoidable, nor is there any period in adult life when it may not happen, or anybody we know so old that he or she may not occasion it. Fact is more romantic, or at any rate remains romantic much later in life, than fiction. Only the other day I read in the newspaper of a man of one hundred and thirty-five years who had just subjected his little circle to this formality. Very likely the newspaper exaggerated, but the case undermines the security that one ordinarily feels in his relationship with the ageing.

Now it needs no argument that to be happy in the happiness of others is an inexpensive pleasure and well worth cultivating. Other things being equal, one should go dancing and singing to his first meeting with another’s beloved. Bright-colored flowers, be she sixteen or sixty, should blossom, to his imagination, from the granite curb along his way; and, though a foolish convention may repress the song and dance, yet should he walk as if shod with the most levitating heels ever made from the liveliest of live rubber, and sing merrily in his heart.

But, thus to enter into the happiness of another, one must see and feel, as if for himself, some good and sufficient reason for that happiness; and the deep, insoluble mystery essential to all proper betrothals is that this good and sufficient reason is not necessarily visible: these two are happy-mad, and how shall anybody who is sane enter into their lunacy?

Mr. Harvey Todd, 2d,—to take the first name that comes to mind,—has become engaged to Miss Margaret Lemon; Miss Lemon to Mr. Todd. Well and good. Nature, which, for some reason that mankind has long curiously and vainly sought to penetrate, wishes to continue the human race, is, one may believe, reasonably well satisfied. It is one job among many. But the satisfaction of Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon, if it could be put to such haberdashery use, would girdle the Equator, and the ends, tied in a true lover’s knot, would flutter beyond the farthest visible star. Men and women have become engaged in the past; men and women will become engaged in the future; but this engagement of Harvey Todd and Margaret Lemon is and will ever remain unique—and so whoever is now called upon to appraise one party to this wonder and congratulate the other, may well be troubled. He is not so much afraid of what he may do and say,—for any man may hope to achieve a hard, quick, almost sobbing pressure of the hand and a few muttered words,—as of the way, in spite of himself, that he will look when he does and says it; there, indeed, the amateur actor profits by his hobby. There is, to be sure, the saving chance that Miss Lemon (or Mr. Todd) may so pleasurably affect him that the ordeal will be less difficult than he anticipates: there is even the rare chance that he may instantly and completely agree with Mr. Todd’s estimate of Miss Lemon; but this is the happy-madness itself, and certainly not desirable under the circumstances. There is the possibility, even more rare and less desirable, that Miss Lemon, seeing him for the first time, will instantly and completely prefer him to Mr. Todd. There is the possibility that he may recoil with horror from Miss Lemon (or Mr. Todd), or be recoiled from, or that both may recoil simultaneously, falling over, figuratively, on their backs, and being picked up and carried away unconscious, and in opposite directions, by surprised onlookers. His whole nature may, in short, instinctively run toward, or away from, the beloved; and between these extremes lies a gamut of intermediary emotions, which at the moment he would hardly wish to uncover. This stiff and geometrical smile, he asks himself at the worst, can it deceive anybody? this hypocritical mutter of congratulation, does it proceed from his own or an ice chest? Nor is he much relieved when Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon, as the case may be, proves how genuine appeared his smile, how sincere his mutter, by asking him in affectionate detail what he thinks of the other—a procedure which should be legally forbidden the newly engaged, under penalty of being refused a marriage license for at least ten years.

This state of mind in lovers, so important to those who are called upon to meet the beloved for the first time, has engaged the attention of essayists, conversationalists, and philosophers. “They fall at once,” wrote Stevenson, “into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centre point of God’s creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought, that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow creature. And all the while their acquaintances look on in stupor.”

“No, sir,” said Dr. Johnson, promptly improving Mr. Boswell’s milder assertion that love is like being enlivened with champagne, “No, sir. Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne”—an opinion, one hopes, that will not some day be made the basis of a nation-wide campaign to prohibit falling in love.

“His friends,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.”

Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon (so like a rainbow) are impervious to any lack of enthusiasm that you or I, dear, unselfish, sensitive reader, may fear to exhibit when either leads us the other by the hand and says, “This is IT.” Ours, if any, will be the suffering. It may even happen that Miss Lemon or Mr. Todd—Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon beaming consent and approval—will suggest that we call her (or him) Margaret (or Harvey).

Yet from another point of view, but this is a selfish one, apprehension is justified in proportion to the sensitive man’s previous intimacy with the individual whose beloved he is about to meet. For until that meeting is over, “previous” is the word for it: whatever opinion the beloved may form of him will determine the degree and manner of its continuance. If Miss Lemon disapproves of him, though Mr. Todd has hitherto loved him as Damon did Pythias, all is over; if Mr. Todd disapproves of him, though he has known Miss Lemon from her perambulator, all is over. A pale ghost, he may, in either case, sometimes hang his spectral hat in the Todd hallway, and even extend his phantom legs under the Todd mahogany; but ALL IS OVER. Divinely harmonious as they seem, these two will never agree to let him try, however humbly and conscientiously, to cultivate the inexpensive pleasure of being happy in their happiness. He becomes what no self-respecting man can wish to be—a fly in the ointment. Most cases, fortunately, are not so serious: he will be given a reasonable chance to make a place for himself on this new plane to which Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon have been translated; but it is always a question whether he can enter that plane himself, or must hereafter be content with hearing from his former friend through a medium. For he has not, as is so often gracefully but emptily said on these trying occasions, been enriched by the acquisition of a new friend: he has simply exchanged Miss Lemon or Mr. Todd (as the case may be) for a composite, a Toddlemon or a Lemontodd—a few years will show which. He must make the best he can of that composite. He who was formerly described as (let us say) “my friend, Mr. Popp,” becomes, if he becomes at all, “our friend, Mr. Popp”; and if ever he hears himself being introduced as “Mr. Todd’s friend, Mr. Popp,” or as “Mrs. Todd’s friend, Mr. Popp,” he had better go away as soon as politeness permits, and never come back. Never.

I speak, of course, in generalities; for there are no rules immutably governing all cases, and life is mellowed and beautified by shining, sensible examples, in which Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon become one, yet realize that in many respects, being human, they must still remain two; then, indeed, the congratulator may actually be enriched by the acquisition of a new friend—but not instantly, as one is enriched by the acquisition of a new hat. Yet it is always the wiser part, in preparing to meet a beloved, to prepare for the worst.

These are evidently the apprehensions of a bachelor, sensitive but not unselfish; the mental attitude is different with a student, philosopher, and idealist who, thinking not of himself, contemplates another’s marriage in the calm, intelligent way, having as yet no beloved in which he can contemplate his own. Such a one weighs. Such a one is conscious that, little as he knows the beloved of Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon, there is grave danger that Mr. Todd knows Miss Lemon, or Miss Lemon Mr. Todd, hardly better. This happy-madness may not only be a delusion, as a calm outside intelligence contemplates it, but it may be a snare. Mistakes do happen. There are known cases in which the happy lunatic has been mistaken in a beloved not once but often; and the persistent effort of these poor madmen and madwomen to correct one mistake by making another is one of the most discussed and pitiable phases of our civilization. The calm intelligence must balance also the practical aspects of the business, its risks and liabilities as well as its profits; and so serious is the enterprise when thus examined that he can hardly fail to be terrified for anybody he knows and loves who is undertaking it.

O Harvey! Harvey! (or Margaret! Margaret!)

Tact is what he will pray for. And if his prayer is granted, when Mr. Todd (or Miss Lemon) asks him, “Now, honestly, what do you think of her (or him)?” he will say, “Of course I do not know Miss Lemon (or Mr. Todd) very well yet, but I have never met anybody whom I hoped to know and like better.” Which will be quite true, and please the twittering questioner much more than if he said, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.”