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

^VIRGmiBUS PUERISQUE'
merely personal sense exists no longer. The lover
takes a perilous pleasure in privately displaying his
weak points, and having them, one after another,
accepted and condoned. He wishes to be assured
that he is not loved for this or that good quality,
but for himself, or something as like himself as he
can contrive to set forward. For, although it may
have been a very difficult thing to paint the marriage
of Cana, or write the fourth act of Antony and
Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of art
before every one in this world who cares to set
about explaining his own character to others.
Words and acts are easily wrenched from their true
significance ; and they are all the language we have
to come and go upon. A pitiful job we make of it
as a rule. For better or worse, people mistake our
meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valua-
tion. And generally we rest pretty content with
our failures ; we are content to be misapprehended
by cackling flirts ; but when once a man is moon-
struck with this affisction of love, he makes it a
point of honour to clear such dubieties away. He
cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point
of this importance ; and his pride revolts at being
loved in a mistake.
He discovers a great reluctance to return on
former periods of his life. To all that has not been
shared with her, rights and duties, bygone fortunes
and dispositions, he can look back only by a difficult
and repugnant effort of the will. That he should
have wasted some years in ignorance of what alone
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