"Meanwhile your wife has talked all she knows, and all she says thereafter has a familiar sound. She delights in stories with many repetitions in them. Her little brain travels from the pantry to the table, from the tea table to the children's bath tub; its widest circuit is the millinery store and the bargain counter. She gets fat, that's another distressing phase of my trouble, let me say. I seem to be gifted with a prophetic eye in the midst of my transports—"
"Think of you in a transport!"
"I am able to see just how each one will change, how this pretty plumpness will get fat, how this delicate slimness will get bony. I see how this beautiful alert face will get beakish. In other words I am troubled about the future, when I should be involved only in the ecstasy of the present. In this latest case I see excessive plumpness and chatter in ten years. I see myself bored to death with her within ten months. She is at her best now; in striving to win me she is like a female bird, her plumage is at its best; she will grow dowdy when the incentive is gone.
"There are other considerations. Aurelia, too, has exaggerated notions of my power to earn money. She may expect me to maintain an expensive establishment. I can't ask anything of the political pirate, her father; I can only put my income into the treasury. If my power to earn money decreases, as it may, then I become an object of contempt on the part of the old savage, who considers money the measure of ability. Suppose at last I come to the point of borrowing money, of going to the old man humbly, twisting my hat in my hand: 'My dear sir, Aurelia and the children'—Pah!"
He uttered a sound of disgust and anger and fell silent.
Sanborn mused, "I wonder if the lovers of any other age had any such scruples about marriage. I guess you're right about Aurelia, but I don't believe you are about the sculptress. I think she would make you happy."
Mason mused a moment and then went on:
"Well, now, as to that—marry her and we plunge, inside of two years, into a squalid struggle for bread and coal and a roof. I elect myself at once into the ranks of dray-horses, and, as I said before, I chain a genius to the neck-yoke with me. That is also out of the question."
Sanborn sought his hat.
"Well, Mason, this has been a season of plain speaking. I'd feel pretty bad over it if I thought it was real. When you get the whole thing typewritten I should like to read it to Isabel and Rose."