point of view. It is a fearful strain to live up to it. In fact, nobody can do it. But I never could see why you had to stick to one or the other. Why can't you mix the two?

Ideal love is a beautiful thing to think about or to live in for a few weeks or months—according to your temperament. It cannot be equalled for the first part of an engagement or the honeymoon. But it is like going to the theatre and seeing the grandeur of the old gray castle, and the perpetual moonlight, and the devoted love of the satin duchess for the velvet duke. You know that it is just acting, and that the villain is not really going to swim the moat with his band of steel warriors, and burn the castle, and capture the duchess and marry her by force. Yet I love to pretend. I dearly love to take two pocket-handkerchiefs with me and sop them both—and I would like to cry out loud, only I never do; but I always have to pull my veil down and feel my way out of the theatre. I love to throw myself into it, and it always annoys me when the acting is so bad that I cannot. If any man sees any moral in that, let him heed it, and believe that I am only one of ten thousand other girls who would like to throw ourselves into the illusion of it only your acting is so bad that we cannot.