“Nor I, you may be very sure.” The caressing tone of his voice sounded natural to him now. “As I was saying, even if we two young people had once thought of the thing, I fancy it would be different now, anyway. Then, I was going to be a farmer. Now, of course, that is all changed. My career is in the city, in circles where Annie would not be at home. She is a dear, good girl, as you say: nobody knows that better than I do. But you must admit she is—what shall I say?—rural. Now that I have got my foot on the ladder, there is no telling how far I may not climb. It would be simply suicide to marry a wife whom I perhaps would have to carry up with me, a dead weight.”
The youngster was not in the least conscious of the vicious nonsense he was talking. In the magnetic penumbra of Isabel’s presence his words seemed surcharged with wisdom and good feeling. And the young woman, too, who was four years his senior, and who should have known better, never suspected the ridiculous aspect of the sentiments to the expression of which she listened with such sweet-faced sympathy. We are such fools upon occasion.
“Besides, there is no reason why I should think of marriage at all, for a long time to come—at least not until I have made my way up in my profession a bit. When the time does come, it will be because I have found my ideal—for I have an ideal, you know, a very exalted one.”
He looked at her keenly, blushing as he did so, to discover if she had caught the purport of his words; then he addressed himself, with an absence of verbal awkwardness at which he was himself astonished, to making it more clear.
“I mean, Isabel, that my brother has won a prize which would make anything less valuable seem altogether worthless in my eyes. If there is not another woman in the world like my brother Albert’s wife, then I shall never marry.”
“Brother Albert’s wife” looked up at the speaker for an instant—a glance which seemed to him to be made of smiles, sadness, delight, reproach and many other unutterable things; then she bent over her work, and he fancied that the pretty fingers trembled a little between the stitches. There was a minute of silence, which seemed a half hour. At last she spoke:
“Does your brother impress you as being a particularly happy man? I won’t ask a similar question about his wife.”
Seth found it necessary to stand up, to do this subject justice. “No!” he answered. “He doesn’t deserve such a wife. But because one man is incapable of appreciating a treasure which he has won, it’s no reason why another man shouldn’t—shouldn’t say to himself ‘I will either marry that kind of woman or I’ll marry none.’ Now, is it, Isabel?”
“Perhaps this wife is not altogether the treasure you think she is,” the young woman answered, with the indirection of her sex.
Seth found words entirely inadequate to express his dissent. He could only smile at her, as if the doubt were too preposterous to be even suggested, and walk up and down in front of her.