, my drive from Hammersmith to Bloomsbury, and all the quiet happy
life I had seen so many hints of, even apart from my shopping, would have been
enough to tell me that the sacred rights of property, as we used to think of
them, were now no more. So I sat silent while the old man took up the thread of
the discourse again, and said:
    »Well, then, property quarrels being no longer possible, what remains in
these matters that a court of law could deal with? Fancy a court for enforcing a
contract of passion or sentiment! If such a thing were needed as a reductio ad
absurdum of the enforcement of contract, such a folly would do that for us.«
    He was silent again a little, and then said: »You must understand once for
all that we have changed these matters; or rather, that our way of looking at
them has changed, as we have changed within the last two hundred years. We do
not deceive ourselves, indeed, or believe that we can get rid of all the trouble
that besets the dealings between the sexes. We know that we must face the
unhappiness that comes of man and woman confusing the relations between natural
passion, and sentiment, and the friendship which, when things go well, softens
the awakening from passing illusions: but we are not so mad as to pile up
degradation on that unhappiness by engaging in sordid squabbles about livelihood
and position, and the power of tyrannising over the children who have been the
results of love or lust.«
    Again he paused awhile, and again went on: »Calf love, mistaken for a
heroism that shall be life-long, yet early waning into disappointment; the
inexplicable desire that comes on a man of riper years to be the all-in-all to
some one woman, whose ordinary human kindness and human beauty he has idealised
into superhuman perfection, and made the one object of his desire; or lastly the
reasonable longing of a strong and thoughtful man to become the most intimate
friend of some beautiful and wise woman, the very type of the beauty and glory
of the world which we love so well, - as we exult in all the pleasure and
exaltation of spirit which goes with these things, so we set ourselves to bear
the sorrow which not unseldom goes with them also; remembering those lines of
the ancient poet (I quote roughly from memory one of the many translations of
the nineteenth century):
 
For this the Gods have fashioned man's grief and evil day
That still for man hereafter might be the tale and
