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Now, this intensity of focus, this egotism, is often confused with altruism, and is labelled "Devotion to another." Society, it will be urged, may suffer from the exclusiveness of sex, but is it not ennobled by the spectacle of utter self-devotion, the devotion of the lover to his mistress, of the wife to her husband. A Frenchman long ago defined love—with a truth that is not at all necessarily cynical—as Le grand égoïsme à deux. No one who has gone through the experience of "falling in love" will deny that the definition is illuminating. One secret of the intense joy of loving and being loved is the immense reinforcement of one's own personality. Suddenly, to another you become what you have always been to yourself, the centre of the universe. You are more vividly conscious, more sure of yourself. Many motives move a man and a woman to marriage, but of these not the meanest is a healthy and hungry egotism.
But surely, it will be urged, self-devotion cannot be akin to egotism. The self is "lost in another." "Hence the purifying, elevating nature of the flame of love, which burns up all the dross of selfishness," etc., etc. But does it? Can any honest man or woman say that he or she, with single-hearted devotion, desires solely the good of the beloved one? A man desires his wife's happiness. That happiness comes to her through another, not through him. Is he utterly content? What he really desires is not solely her happiness but that her happiness should be in him.
Surely, though, there is such a thing as utter devotion, that asks no return. The spirit of "though he slay
