Mistress and Maid by Dinah Mulock

Let us linger a little over this chapter of happy love: so sweet, so rare a thing. Aye, most rare: though hundreds continually meet, love, or fancy they do, engage themselves, and marry; and hundreds more go through the same proceeding, with the slight difference of the love omitted -- Hamlet, with the part of Hamlet left out. But the real love, steady and true: tried in the balance, and not found wanting: tested by time, silence, separation; by good and ill fortune; by the natural and inevitable change which years make in every character -- this is the rarest thing to be found on earth, and the most precious.

I do not say that all love is worthless which is not exactly this sort of love. There have been people who have succumbed instantly and permanently to some mysterious attraction, higher than all reasoning; the same which made Hilary "take an interest" in Robert Lyon's face at church, and made him, he afterward confessed, the very first time he gave Ascott a lesson in the parlor at Stowbury, say to himself, "If I did marry, I think I should like such a wife as that brown-eyed bit lassie. " And there have been other people, who choosing their partners from accidental circumstances, or from mean worldly motives, have found Providence kinder to them than they deserved, and settled down into happy, affectionate husbands and wives.