To my growing surprise and
amazement I found that not only did those ancient authors look upon
women as inferior beings while I worshipped them, but in their
descriptions of the symptoms of love I looked in vain for mention of
those supersensual emotions and self-sacrificing impulses which
overcame me when I was in love. "Can it be," I whispered to myself,
"that, notwithstanding the universal opinion to the contrary, love is,
after all, subject to the laws of development?"
This hypothesis threw me into a fever of excitement, without the
stimulus of which I do not believe I should have had the courage and
patience to collect, classify, and weave into one fabric the enormous
number of facts and opinions contained within the covers of _Romantic
Love and Personal Beauty_. I believed that at last something new under
the sun had been found, and I was so much afraid that the discovery
might leak out prematurely, that for two years I kept the first half
of my title a secret, telling inquisitive friends merely that I was
writing a book on Personal Beauty. And no one but an author who is in
love with his theme and whose theme is love can quite realize what a
supreme delight it was--with occasional moments of anxious
suspense--to go through thousands of books in the libraries of
America, England, France, and Germany and find that all discoverable
facts, properly interpreted, bore out my seemingly paradoxical and
reckless theory.
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