The world does not
believe in them; they are inconvenient and undesirable; they are even
immoral. What the world wants, and very rightly, in a person of your
attractiveness is quiet domesticity of character, not the exhibition of
attributes which though they might qualify you for the rank of heroine
in a Greek drama, are nowadays only likely to qualify you for the
reprobation of society.
What? you would rather keep your love, your reprehensible love which
never can be satisfied, and bear its slings and arrows, and die hugging
a shadow to your heart, straining your eyes into the darkness of that
beyond whither you shall go--murmuring with your pale lips that _there_
you will find reason and fulfilment? Why it is folly. What ground have
you to suppose that you will find anything of the sort? Go and take the
opinion of some scientific person of eminence upon this infatuation of
yours and those vague visions of glory that shall be. He will explain
it clearly enough, will show you that your love itself is nothing but
a natural passion, acting, in your case, on a singularly sensitive and
etherealised organism.
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