"Then the case seems to me hopeless."
"Precisely. The case seems hopeless. After ten years careful study of the matter I have come to the conclusion that I was born to something besides matrimony. Cases of glamour get less and less common now, and I foresee the time when the most beautiful creature in the world will possess no glamour."
Sanborn imaginatively entered into this gloomy mood. "Nothing will then remain but death."
"Exactly! Peaceful old age and decay. But there are deeper deeps to this marriage question, as I warn you now on the eve of your venture. I find in myself a growing inability to conceive of one woman in the light of an exclusive ideal, an ideal of more interest than all the world of women. I am troubled by the 'possible woman.'"
"I don't quite conceive——"
"I mean the woman who might, quite possibly, appeal to me in a more powerful and beautiful way than the one I have. I am not prepared as I approach the point to say I will love and cherish till death. In the unknown deeps of life there are other women, more alluring, more beautiful still. So I must refuse to make a promise which I am not sure I can keep."
"Isabel and I have agreed to leave that out of our ceremony," said Sanborn; "also the clause which demands obedience from her."
"I am watching you. If your experiment succeeds, and I can find a woman as fine and sensible and self-reliant—but there again my confounded altruism comes in. I think also of the woman. Ought I to break into the orderly progress of her life? I can't afford to throw myself away, I can't afford to place a barrier between me and the 'possible woman,' and, per contra, neither can the woman afford to make a mistake; it bears harder upon women than it does upon men. When the glorious 'possible woman' comes along I want to be free. So the woman might reasonably want to be free when the ideal man comes along."
"If you really love, these considerations would not count."
Mason waved a silencing palm.