He could allow himself the theatre, having never cherished lime-lit illusions, nor hovered to dispel them about the stage door. He had always what he was pleased to call a frugal taste in beauty, and had never made a bid for any that was 'priced'!
But the theatres only served him for a week, and even so with some exaggeration of what he wished to see. At the end of a second, he decided that a wife was as essential as repentance to a change of life, and dropped back into his old ways.
And the devil, who, perhaps as a reprisal for the deficiencies of his own abode, takes a pleasure in knocking the bottom out of every sort of domicile, at once put his foot through the flooring of Maurice Caragh's reform.
At least he met Laura Marton at the dinner which closed his fortnight's sojourn in the wilderness.
He was suffering from those two weeks of his own society, but, probably, even without that preparation, he would have capitulated to her charm.
To speak of him, so consecutively, in the hands of three women gives too crowded an impression of his susceptiveness. No trait was, in fact, further from his character.
Three years were passed since he met Ethel Vernon, and he had not harboured in all of them so much as a vexed thought about a woman's face.
He was pleased so far from easily, that he might very readily have failed throughout his life to have been pleased at all. But when pleased, it was on the instant and absorbingly. Ten seconds he had suggested as an average requirement for falling in love, but it is questionable if any of his own declensions had taken half that time. Nor was proximity at all essential. He could not recall, he admitted modestly, having discovered that a woman was adorable at more than a hundred yards. But he had no wish to exalt his own experience into a standard: he could believe in anything up to half a mile.
In that, such was the delicacy of his distinctions, he was perfectly sincere; but it was that delicacy which made them so prohibitive to adorations even at half a mile.
Laura Marton might, perhaps, have tested such a distance successfully, she was so perfectly his conception of a type.