Though I had no intention of buying many books, the dreary loneliness of the tavern where I supped drove me out upon the streets, and insensibly I drifted towards my favourite second-hand book-shop, where the little maiden behind the mountains of Welsh theology reminds me of someone I know. My Welsh Divinity I call her, hovering bright-winged above the dust-clouds of old literature, with clear grey eyes and nervous mouth. Not “the heir of all the ages,” I fear, though the potentiality in her must be infinite and beyond my ken. “What do you, oh, young man?” So I seem to read the query in her eyes. “Are you only a hodman in this book-yard, then? Where is she? What is she? Who is she?” As I stand and thumb the serried ranks of corpses, I feel her gaze upon me. Quite inarticulate, both of us, you understand—I as shy as she.

I must seem extraordinarily sensitive to you, I think. Merely the presence of this child stirs my soul to nobler ideals. I feel invigorated and refreshed. So my lady stirs me; so even the mere presence of some men we know. In like manner, I imagine, is my friend influenced by superb music. They affect me like an essay by Pater, a Watts portrait, or a Dulwich Cuyp, a feeling which I can only call a passionate intellectualism, a loosening of corporeal encumbrances. My friend will not carp because I seem to place my love for my mistress in a category with a Dutch landscape and an aesthetic essay—he will understand.I have no desire to be proud, but I confess I have never appreciated that amorousness which prompts the lovers to exchange hats as well as vows. Indeed, I scarcely understand what the older poets mean by vows even. What are these vows? By whom are they kept? Of what avail are they when they are most needed? Nearly as useless as marriage vows, these of the trysting-place, I fancy. You hold up your hands in horror at this, not because you disagree, but because of my audacity in applying general modernisms to myself. Well, I am tired of people who pose as advanced thinkers and remain as conventional as ever. We have outgrown so much of the sentimentalism of Love that muddle-headed moderns imagine that we have outgrown Love itself. The keynote of everything worthy in modern life and art and philosophy is—restraint. I decline to regard ranting as eloquence because the Elizabethan ranted well, and I decline also to accept the Shakesperian conception of Love, viz., physical satiety, as the very latest thing in ideals.

Restraint, then! A marriage is doubtless, as Chesterton so admirably puts it, a passionate compromise, but it does not follow that love is therefore a compromising debauchery. It may be that I, who have my ways far from feminine influence, tend to place women in a rarer and purer atmosphere than most of them breathe, and that this tendency unfits me for judging them accurately. Let it be so. Let my Welsh Divinity watch me from beyond the dust-clouds of learning with her grey eyes, while I pray never to lose my reverence for the quiet loveliness of which she is, so unconsciously, the type.