We must revise our conceptions as to the love-passions of these
southerners; no people are more fundamentally sane in matters of the
heart; they have none of our obfuscated sentimentality; they are seldom
naively enamoured, save in early stages of life. It is then that small
girls of eight or ten may be seen furtively recording their feelings on
the white walls of their would-be lovers' houses; these archaic scrawls
go straight to the point, and are models of what love-letters may
ultimately become, in the time-saving communities of the future. But
when the adolescent and perfumed-pink-paper stage is reached, the
missives relapse into barbarous ambiguity; they grow allegorical and
wilfully exuberant as a Persian carpet, the effigy of a pierced heart at
the end, with enormous blood-drops oozing from it, alone furnishing a
key to the document.
So far they are in earnest, and it is the girl who takes the lead; her
youthful innamorato ties these letters into bundles and returns them
conscientiously, in due course, to their respective senders. Seldom does
a boy make overtures in love; he gets more of it than he knows what to
do with; he is still torpid, and slightly bored by all these attentions.
But presently he wakes up to the fact that he is a man among men, and
the obsession of "looking manly" becomes a part of his future artificial
and rhetorical life-scheme.
