“Be honest with yourself,” it said. “You aren’t often. No man is. Look at the matter absolutely fairly. You know perfectly well that the mere idea of marriage has always scared you. You hate making yourself conspicuous in public. Think what it would be like, standing up there in front of all the world and getting married. And then—afterward! Why on earth do you think that you would have been happy with this girl? What do you know about her except that she is a beauty? I grant you she’s that, but are you aware of the infinitesimal part looks play in married life? My dear chap, better is it for a man that he marry a sympathetic gargoyle than a Venus with a streak of hardness in her. You know—and you would admit it if you were honest with yourself—that this girl is hard. She’s got a chilled-steel soul.
“If you wanted to marry someone—and there’s no earthly reason why you should, for your life’s perfectly full and happy with your work—this is the last girl you ought to marry. You’re a middle-aged man. You’re set. You like life to jog along at a peaceful walk. This girl wants it to be a foxtrot. You’ve got habits which you have had for a dozen years. I ask you, is she the sort of girl to be content to be a stepmother to a middle-aged man’s habits? Of course if you were really in love with her, if she were your mate, and all that sort of thing, you would take a pleasure in making yourself over to suit her requirements. But you aren’t in love with her. You are simply caught by her looks. I tell you, you ought to look on that moment when she gave you back your ring as the luckiest moment of your life. You ought to make a sort of anniversary of it. You ought to endow a hospital or something out of pure gratitude. I don’t know how long you’re going to live—if you act like a grown-up man instead of a boy and keep out of woods and shrubberies at night, you may live forever—but you will never have a greater bit of luck than the one that happened to you tonight.”
Mr. Pickering was convinced. His spirits soared. Marriage! What was marriage? Slavery, not to be endured by your man of spirit. Look at all the unhappy marriages you saw everywhere. Besides, you had only to recall some of the novels and plays of recent years to get the right angle on marriage. According to the novelists and playwrights, shrewd fellows who knew what was what, if you talked to your wife about your business she said you had no soul; if you didn’t she said you didn’t think enough of her to let her share your life. If you gave her expensive presents and an unlimited credit account she complained that you looked on her as a mere doll; and if you didn’t she called you a tightwad. What was marriage? If it didn’t get you with the left jab it landed on you with the right uppercut. None of that sort of thing for Dudley Pickering.
“You’re absolutely right,” he said enthusiastically. “Funny I never looked at it that way before.”
Somebody was turning the door handle. He hoped it was Roscoe Sherriff. He had been rather dull the last time Sherriff had looked in. He would be quite different now. He would be gay and sparkling. He remembered two good Ford stories he would like to tell Sherriff.
The door opened and Claire came in. There was a silence. She stood looking at him in a way that puzzled Mr. Pickering. If it had not been for her attitude at their last meeting and the manner in which she had broken that last meeting up, he would have said that her look seemed somehow to strike a note of appeal. There was something soft and repentant about her. She suggested, it seemed to Mr. Pickering, the prodigal daughter revisiting the old homestead.
“Dudley!”
She smiled a faint smile, a wistful, deprecating smile. She was looking lovelier than ever. Her face glowed with a wonderful color and her eyes were very bright. Mr. Pickering met her gaze, and strange things began to happen to his mind, that mind which a moment before had thought so clearly and established so definite a point of view.
What a gelatin-backboned thing is man, who prides himself on his clear reason and becomes as wet blotting-paper at one glance from bright eyes! A moment before, Mr. Pickering had thought out the whole subject of woman and marriage in a few bold flashes of his capable brain, and thanked Providence that he was not as those men who take unto themselves wives to their undoing. Now in an instant he had lost that iron outlook. Reason was temporarily out of business. He was slipping.
“Dudley!”
For a space Subconscious Self thrust itself forward.
“Look out! Be careful!” it warned.
Mr. Pickering ignored it. He was watching, fascinated, the glow on Claire’s face, her shining eyes.
“Dudley, I want to speak to you.”
“Tell her you can only be seen by appointment! Escape! Bolt!”
Mr. Pickering did not bolt. Claire came toward him, still smiling that pathetic smile. A thrill permeated Mr. Pickering’s entire one hundred and ninety-seven pounds, trickling
