Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1881 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

58 "■ Virginibtis Piicrisquer
meanour. If people grow presuming and self-
important over such matters as a dukedom or
the Holy See, they will scarcely support the
dizziest elevation in life without some suspicion
of a strut ; and the dizziest elevation is to love
and be loved in return. Consequently, accepted
lovers are a trifle condescending in their address
to other men. An overweening sense of the
passion and importance of life hardly conduces
to simplicity of manner. To women, they feel
veiy nobly, very purely, and very generously,
as if they were so many Joan-of-Arc's ; but this
does not come out in their behaviour ; and they
treat them to Grandisonian airs marked with a
suspicion of fatuity. I am not quite certain
that women do not like this sort of thing ; but
really, after having bemused myself over Daniel
Deronda, I have given up trying to understand
what they like.
If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridi-
culous superstition, that the pleasure of the pair