She had to leave the roses and walk on again beside him, steeling herself to bear whatever might be coming. And, feeling that unconscious accusation loomed, she tried, as unconsciously, to mollify and evade it.
"It isn't always the animal, exactly, is it?--or emotion only? It is romance and blind love for a person that leads people astray."
"Isn't that the animal?" Augustine inquired. "I don't think the animal base, you know, or shameful, if he is properly harnessed and kept in his place. It's only when I see him dominating that I hate and fear him so. And," he went on after a little pause of reflection, "I especially hate him in that form;--romance and blind love: because what is that, really, but the animal at its craftiest and most dangerous? what is romance--I mean romance of the kind that jeopardizes 'goodness'--what is it but the most subtle self-deception? You don't love the person in the true sense of love; you don't want their good; you don't want to see them put in the right relation to their life as a whole:--what you want is sensation through them; what you want is yourself in them, and their absorption in you. I don't think that wicked, you know--I'm not a monk or even a puritan--if it's the mere result of the right sort of love, a happy glamour that accompanies, the right sort; it's in its place, then, and can endanger nothing. But people are so extraordinarily blind about love; they don't seem able to distinguish between the real and the false. People usually, though they don't know it, mean only desire when they talk of love."
There was another pause in which she wondered that he did not hear the heavy throbbing of her heart. But now there was no retreat; she must go on; she must understand her son. "Desire must enter in," she said.
"In its place, yes; it's all a question of that;" Augustine replied, smiling a little at her, aware of the dogmatic flavour of his own utterances, the humorous aspect of their announcement, to her, by him;--"You love a woman enough and respect her enough to wish her to be the mother of your children--assuming, of course, that you consider yourself worthy to carry on the race; and to think of a woman in such a way is to feel a rightful emotion and a rightful desire; anything else makes emotion the end instead of the result and is corrupting, I'm sure of it."