Love of man for woman - love of woman for man. That’s the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself.

The line reduces life’s highest meaning to reciprocal romantic love between men and women, presenting heterosexual pairing as both “nature” and the “best of life.” Its emphatic, almost aphoristic structure (balanced clauses, repeated key terms) suggests a character speaking with hard-won certainty, as if cutting through ambition, violence, or social complication to name what ultimately matters. In Grey’s fictional world—often shaped by frontier hardship and moral testing—such a sentiment typically functions as a counterweight to conflict: love is framed as the stabilizing force that gives purpose to endurance and struggle. Read critically, it also reflects early-20th-century assumptions about gender complementarity and the centrality of conventional romance.