"Going back, therefore—I do not believe I can assume the risk involved. I'm not capable of twenty years' work at my present rate. I'd break down, some fine day, and then my little home, upheld upon my Atlas palm, would tumble. No, I can't take the risk. I'm getting too foxy; I haven't the bounce I once had. Besides, her career is to be considered. I don't believe I can afford to let her marry me."
"That's mighty kind of you," Sanborn dryly remarked.
"Thank you. I think it is an error of judgment on her part. She is younger, and as her adviser I think I must interfere and save her from the power of a vivid imagination and abounding vitality. You see, there are a great many considerations involved."
"Real love, I must repeat, would not consider."
"I wish you wouldn't repeat it, it does you an injustice. The animal passion of youth would not consider. With youth, it is marry—marry, even if within the year you are picked up by the patrol wagon, a vagrant in the streets. The love of my time is not so heedless nor so selfish; it extends to the question of the other party to the transaction."
"I suppose that should be so, but as a physician I doubt it. My observations do not run that way. Age grows like a child again, thoroughly selfish."
"Then there is the question of the 'possible woman,'" Mason resumed, and his tone was cynically humorous again. "I can't give her up. There she stands in a radiant mist always just before me like the rainbow of our childhood. I can't promise any woman to love her till death. I don't know as it would be safe to promise it even to the woman with glamour. Another might come with a subtler glory, and a better fitting glamour, and then—"
"What then?"
"It would all be up with the first woman," he said with a gravity of tone of which the words gave no hint.
"I'm afraid some one has already come to make pale the beauty of the sculptress. What about the other, the rich girl you set over against the sculptress at the beginning? Mind you, I believe the whole situation is fictitious, but I'll humor you in it."