Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/40

 repngnance, and consequent misery, and what grows out of it. Boy or girl love seldom is enduring, and, as results, we see repulsion, drinking, tobacco and opium using, the brothel and the racecourse, anything for excitement, anything to kill the dreadful distemper of. dissatisfaction. Fashion, frivolity, shopping, gossip, the theatre, church-going, — not for worship, but for forgetfulness, — temporary lethe and oblivion, on the other hand; not seldom driving the sufferer to bad courses, oftentimes to suicide, and premature death from disease, consumption of the lungs, because a heart is not filled. We have certain God-given rights, the greatest of which is that of being loved, truly, nobly, purely, for our own sakes, and not for what clings to us as a natural accident, as hair, skin, voice, beauty, or bank-bills; for in the currency of hearts all these are — trash!

Oh, the bursting, breaking hearts in the world! hearts with aching voids which only love can fill, — not passion — but love! Well, there are millions of just such hearts in the world, martyrs, murmurless, whose secrets are unknown, pining hearts that yearn and long, and pray to heaven, — a heaven that oft seems leaden and stony to them, — pray and yearn for just a little human love, — asking for bread, receiving a stone; yearning for affection, and met with brutal, unthinking, irrational passion! Woman-hearts, human hearts, that presently burst asunder, permitting tired souls to go from hell on earth to heavens of blissful — rest; for, since the dear mother died, love below has been theoretically offered, but practically denied, and all its holy rights ignored. What a sight of skeletons our houses contain! Why? Because at best women are treated as a softer sort of men, and not as their nature demands.

Love is a thing of soul; but as souls are spiritual, they require bridges to span the dividing gulfs, and these bridges are our bodies, — our shape, color, hair, eyes, hands, — our totalities physical, — and through the physical spheres we generate and exhale, the finer magnetisms flow and fuse and blend the twain into one supremely happy dual being.

"Dear me, how strangely worn out and exhausted I feel!" — "Indeed, sir. What have you been doing? Where have you been?" — "Oh, nothing, only down to the house of a friend, where I met a strange lady, and sat by her side. She seemed quite lively