"As far as my personal preferences go," he wrote to Hildred, "I would rather remain as I am. Remaining as I am would be easier. I'm free; I've no one to consider; I know my own way of life, and can follow it pretty surely. But I'm not adaptable. You yourself must often have noticed that my mind works stiffly, and that I find it hard to see the other fellow's point of view. I'm narrow, solitary, concentrated, and self-willed. But as long as I've no one to consult I can get along.
"To enter a family of which I know nothing of the ways or traditions or points of view is going to be a tough job. It will be much tougher than if I merely married into it. In that case I should be only an adjunct to it, whereas in what may happen now I shall have to become an integral part of it. I must be as a leg instead of as a crutch. I don't know how I shall manage it.
"I'm not easily intimate with anyone. Perhaps that's the reason why, as you say, I haven't enough of the lover in me. I'm not naturally a lover. I'm not naturally a friend. I'm a solitary. A solitude à deux, with the servants, as you always like to stipulate, is my conception of an earthly paradise.
"To you the normal of life is a father, a mother, a brother, a sister. To me it isn't. To have a father seems abnormal to me, or to have a sister or a brother. If I can see myself with a mother it's because of a poignant experience of the kind that burns itself into the memory. But I can't see myself with another mother, and that's what I've got to do. Mind you, it isn't a stepmother I must see, nor an adopted mother, nor a mother-in-law; it's a real mother of my own flesh and blood. I must see a real brother, a real sister. They think that all they have to do is to fling their doors open, and that it will be a simple thing for me to walk in. But I must fling open something more tightly sealed than any door ever was—my life, my affections, my point of view. They are four, and need only make room for one. I'm only one, and must make room for four.
"But I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it for a number of reasons which I shall try to give you in their order.
"First, for your sake. You want it. For me that is enough. I see your reasons too. It will help us with your father and mother, and all our future life. So that settles that.
"Then, I want to conform to what those who care anything about me would expect. I don't want to seem a fool. It's what I should seem if I turned such an offer down. Nobody would understand my emotional and sentimental reasons but myself; and when it comes to the emotional and sentimental there is a pro side as well as a con to the whole situation.
"Because if I must have a father there's no one whom I could so easily accept as a father as this very man. He seems to me like my father; I think I seem to him like his son. More than that, he looks like my father, and I must look like the kind of son he would naturally have. I'm sure he likes me, and I know I like him. If I was choosing a father he's the very one I should pick out.
"Next, and you may be surprised to hear me say it, I could do very well with Tad as a brother. That he couldn't do with me is another thing; but there's something about the chap which has bewitched me from the day I first laid eyes on him. I haven't liked him exactly; I've only felt for him a kind of responsibility. I've tried to ignore it, to laugh at it, to argue it down; but the thing wouldn't let me kill it. If there's such a thing as an instinct between those of the same flesh and blood I should say that this was it. I've no doubt that if we come to living in one menagerie we shall be the same sort of friends as a lion and a tiger—but there it is.
"The women appall me. I can't express it otherwise. With the father I could be a son as affectionate as if I'd never left the family. With Tad I could establish—I've established already—a sort of fighting fraternity. To neither the mother nor the daughter could I ever be anything, so far as I can see now. They wouldn't let me. They wouldn't want me. If they yield to the extent of admitting me into the family they'll always bar me from their hearts. The limit of my hope is that, since I generally get along with those I have to live with, the hostility won't be too obvious. I also have the prospect that when you and I are married—and that's my motive in the whole business—I shall get a measure of release."