It seems that every creature has a desire to love, and no doubt we all wish to love; the whole world turns upon love — the songs and the poems, the stories and the novels, one and all, speak with its tongue.

A king may give up his throne for love, or a girl flee her parents' house to find it, or a young man roam the quarters of the inhabited earth in search of it; for love is an essential part of our life. And yet how many people know what love is?... We mix it up with money, with sex, or with outward appearance; and we likewise confuse it with our love of ourselves, so that we can scarcely tell it apart from our inclination toward another person.

At times we cannot tell vanity from love, and so the latter remains obscure, beyond our understanding. You may be graduated from the highest institutes and universities and at the same time know nothing of this emotion which forms the axis of your life.

Love or infatuation??

Many people confuse love with infatuation; how then are we to tell the two apart? If you say to me: "I met him two weeks ago, and I am drowned up to my ears in love of him," I judge at once that this is mere infatuation. For love needs a long time to grow; it needs good soil, and care, and then time, before it comes into being. Neither love nor flowers leap to perfection between one night and its morning.

You feel infatuation for a time, and quickly lose the feeling of it; but love stays with you at every hour, and its growth depends on the harmony of relations between the two persons. It does not live by the roadside, for us to pluck up when we please; it is the fruit of effort, of care, and of self-denial.

Beauty is the secret of infatuation, but