"Have you found your soul-mate?" asks Mr. Alfred Edye, a gentleman unknown to us, but doubtless competent to put the question.
That was the query propounded in all seriousness by an intense-looking girl who just missed being pretty to a handsome and ardent young man. I did not catch his reply, but left him gazing in approved fashion into her azure eyes.
So many people talk about their souls. What do they mean?
Is it to admit oneself a Philistine to say that one never quite knows? With some, no doubt, it is a mere pose. They talk about their souls as officers would speak of the weather. They scorn, or profess to scorn, the body. Physical attractions count for nothing. They are the mere outer covering, to be discarded sooner or later like worn-out clothes. It is the soul alone that matters.
Others find this soul-talk a useful conversational gambit. The most subtle method of making love to a certain type of woman is to talk to her about her soul.
It is effective with the beautiful woman who gets thoroughly tired of listening to stale compliments about her loveliness, and it is still more effective with a plain woman who hugs to herself the pleasing fancy that if not outwardly attrac: tive she has an alluring soul.
The soul-mate idea is often the tefuge of those who have made shipwreck of their lives.
The unhappily married sometimes find a: pale consolation for the fulness of life they have missed by discovering a spiritual affinity with someone of the opposite sex. It a dangerous business, and has all the fatal fascination of playing with fire; but it is a relationship mace common than may be supposed.
There are men and women of aa anemic character of body and mind who can find complete satisfaction in a union of souls. They believe themselves to be on a higher plane than ordinary mortals. They despise the body and view the senses with aversion, They live in a my-steal atmosphere where the outward and visible has little account.
Everybody has his twin-soul. Once, according to Platonic notion, there was neither man nor woman, but only pure Being. Then it was split in twain and ever since the sexes have been trying to find their true counterparts.
The tragedy is that so few men and women ever succeed in the quest.
We put up with the makeshift, but in our hearts of hearts we know all the time we have not found what we were looking for. We are restless, unhappy, dissatisfied. We are seeking, ever seeking, for someone we never find.
The really perfect marriages, the only perfect. marriages, are' the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.