Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

* VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE '
until he considered that he had suppUed the defect.
'Now,' he remarked, on entering, 'now I am in a
position, to continue the discussion.' Perhaps he
had not penetrated very deeply into the subject
after all, but the story indicates right thinking, and
may serve as an apologue to readers of this essay.
When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is
not without something of the nature of dismay that
the man finds himself in such changed conditions.
He has to deal with commanding emotions instead
of the easy dishkes and preferences in which he
has hitherto passed his days ; and he recognises
capabilities for pain and pleasure of which he had
not yet suspected the existence. Falling in love is
the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which
we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite
and reasonable world. The effect is out of all
proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of
them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful,
meet, speak a little, and look a little into each
other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of
times in the experience of either with no great
result. But on this occasion all is different. They
fall at once into that state in which another person
becomes to us the very gist and centre-point of God's
creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with
a smile ; in which our ideas are so bound up with the
one master- thought that even the trivial cares of
our own person become so many acts of devotion,
and the love of life itself is translated into a wish
to remain in the same world with so precious and
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