“Old One: (artfully) All the unnatural things and all the disagreeable ones are decent. In Constantinople it isn’t decent for a woman to show her lips. Man invented that word, ‘decent.’ With God there is no decent or indecent. He made ’em all, the good and the bad. Don’t you know your Browning? He made you, Allen Blynn, what you are.
“A. B.: And he made you, you canker! And he made me strong to fight you. Retro! Imp of Darkness! ’Raus!
“Old One: Are you so strong?
“A. B.: No!... Get out!
“Old One: Neither is Leopold—Leopold, your bosom-friend—
“A. B.: (smiting him) Back to hell, you miserable liar! Back! Back!
“Old One: (retreating) Ho! ho! ho! ho! Out haro! out haro! ho! ho! Neither is Leopold!... Leopold!... Leopold!”
On other pages he was full of hope. The dream had come true. He was planning out his life with her. “We must make this go right,” he said. “The world is writing its books against us. Every little novelist and every little playwright is hinting dark things against marriage. They sneer at all the habits of the race and cry, ‘Liberty for the emotions.’ ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they tempt, ‘and also thy neighbor’s wife. Marriage is servitude and a restriction; let’s wallow and be natural.’ Liars and servants of the Old One, every mother’s son. But we must watch carefully. Marriage is like any other attempt at living; it must be tended and watched and fed, not squandered or tossed about. We’ll spend our store of affection like other gifts, not lavishly all at once in one mad spree, but with rare economy; and we’ll keep adding new funds to the old by sharing associations together. We must not begin to have separate interests or even different friends. Marriage is a wonderful art; the ideal is ever beyond achievement, but it is worth striving for.... Did you say, ‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus’?
“I have two complete and separate lives,” he wrote further; “the one I live in the day-time, serious, mature, full of windy arguments of state, books, religion, literature, education; the one I live at night when the hurlyburly of the day is done and I travel these pages with you. My very style is different in these two personalities. In the broad light of day I am somewhat stilted and over-oldish for one so young; here with you sitting sleepy-eyed in the chair before me, I am lithe and bold and gay and boyish. There are no sweethearts in the day-time for Allen Blynn. And that’s a good thing, too; or he couldn’t do a proper day’s work. Sometimes you do bob in, but I rise politely, put on my spectacles, usher you firmly to the door and bid you a pleasant but peremptory ‘good morning.’ Sometimes you slip in by the window, and then I am done for.”
The “Lady of the Interruption” came in for a comment or two. “You have a wrong notion of that Lady; and I have encouraged it; you ask such persistent questions about her eyes and her hair and her dresses—about all of which I know nothing. She is at least fifty, but I have carefully concealed that from you. Your wide-open eyes see a life-partner there and I affect to wonder if it might not be. That’s playing the game square—a little too square, perhaps. At any rate it is right penance for all my sins of desire; and it pleases Conscience mightily and makes the Old One howl.”