From A Very Double Life, The true story of MacKenzie King's incredible private world ~ His Sex Life, His Love Affairs, His Seances  ~

Regarding a lady by the name of Jean Greer, MacKenzie wrote late in his life about an entry in his diary for 1918,
     "There is a case of a door closing, all to one's advantage. . . . Had I married her as I evidently had been prepared to do [!]  I wd have become in all probability a citizen of the U.S. in association with large interests, not P.M. of Canada. . ."

"How did it come about that Mackenzie King, a man who so often got what he wanted, who set out with much apparent determination to find himself a wife, and who persisted in the project for a decade, ended up still a bachelor?
"There is no simple answer, but we can suggest a few obvious points.  First, King wanted too much;  he had in mind a paragon, and paragons are hard to find.  Secondly, he had extreme difficulty in making up his mind;  those doubts that had assailed him as long ago as 1898 when he was worrying about Mathilde Grossert, assailed him still.

              Dread in woman, doubt in man....
                   So the Infinite runs away.

"In these years the Infinite gradually ran away for Mackenzie King.  Finally, in the one case in which he had no doubts at all he seems to have made a fool of himself and frightened the lady off.  However, the case here may have been hopeless anyway;  it is quite possible that Miss Greer was already interested in the man she married in the following year."

~ A Very Double Life,  C. P. Stacey, 1976, Macmillan of Canada

From Charles Dickens Great Expectations ~

"Once it had seemed to me [Pip] that when I should at last roll up my shirt-sleeves and go into the forge, Joe's prentice, I should be distinguished and happy.  Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt that I was dusty with the dust of the small coal, and that I had a weight upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather. . .
"What I wanted, who can say?  How can I say, when I never knew?  What I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest and commonest, should life up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one of the wooden windows of the forge.  I was haunted by the fear that she would, sooner or later find me out, with a black face and hands, doing the coarsest part of my work, and would exult over me and despise me.  Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows for Joe, and we were singing Old Clem, and when the thought how we used to sing it at Miss Havisham's would seem to show me Estella's face in the fire with her pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me ~ ..."

~ Charles Dickens, English writer, critic. (Feb. 7, 1812 - June 9, 1870) Great Expectations,  The Franklin Library

Remember:  St. Valentine's Day is Friday 14th.