When he reached the Ousleys', the youthful husband met him on the veranda and threw an arm around his shoulder affectionately and led him in; and when some time later they reappeared, both talked gravely and parted, bound by a new bond of dependence and helpfulness between man and man.
For the next few days there developed in Dr. Birney a novel consciousness that his interest in marriage had enormously deepened, but that interest in his own marriage had received a setback: the feeling was genuine, and it troubled him. The tentative advances into social life that he had been making seemed to have ended in blind paths; the growing ties snapped like threads upon which some displaced weight has fallen.
What he had been looking for it seemed to him that he had found too late in Josephine Ousley. Had he found her before her marriage, he would have looked at no other, nor have wavered a year. The actual significance of this was that he had encountered one of the persistent dreams of mankind—the dream of ideal love and ideal marriage with one who is unattainable.
The history of the race, of its art, of its literature, has borne through ages testimony to the vividness and to the tyranny of this obsession, this mistake, or this truth which may be one of Nature's deepest. For it may be error and it may be truth, or sometimes the one and sometimes the other. It may be one of the vast forces in Nature which we are but now beginning to observe—one of her instincts of intuitive selection which announces itself instantly and is never to be reversed: such an instinct as governs the mating of other lives not human. But there it is in our own species for us to make out of it what we can. There are men who for the rest of their lives look back upon the mere sight of some woman, a solitary brief meeting with her, as though that were their natural and perfect union. There are women who are haunted by the same influence and allegiance to some man—seen once—perhaps never seen at all except in a picture. Among the dreams of humanity about ideal strength, ideal wisdom, ideal justice and charity and friendship, this must be set apart as its dream of ideal love; and as all high and beautiful dreams about human nature are welcome, provided only we never awaken from them, let those who dream thus dream on. But the tragedy of it falls upon those who in actual life practically supplant the imagined. Let Petrarch dream of Laura, let Dante dream of Beatrice, if only the perfections of Laura and Beatrice do not come into judgment against the actual wives of Petrarchs and Dantes. Let the ideal love of Romeo and Juliet gladden mankind only as a dream of the unfulfilled.
Dr. Birney had fallen under the influence of this error, or this truth: the bride of his friend instantly filled his imagination as that vision of perfection which dreams alone bring to visit us. He was not yet in love with her, not a feeling of his nature had yet made its start towards her: but she had declared herself as for him the ideal woman—ensphered in the unattainable. As proof of this she released in him from the hour of his meeting her finer things than he had been aware of in his own nature: her countenance, her form, her voice, her whole presence, her spirit, disclosed for him for the first time the whole glory and splendor of human life and of a man's union with a woman.
As he tried to withdraw his mind from this belief and fix it upon his own separate future, he discovered that his outlook was no longer single nor clear. Something stood in his path—an irremovable obstacle. Sometimes in sleep we try to drive around an obstruction in our road, and as often as we drive around it it reappears where it was before: such an obstruction had obtruded itself across his progress.
During the following weeks he was often at the Ousleys'—to supper, as a guest in their carriage on visits and to parties: the three were almost inseparable. One night at supper young Ousley again brought up the subject of the doctor's marriage and twitted him for hesitancy: unexpectedly the subject was thrust back into the speaker's teeth: there was an awkward silence—very curious—
And now there befell the doctor one of those peculiar little progressions or retrogressions which prove a man not to be utterly forlorn. He had ceased to make social calls, and had begun to decline invitations; and so into the air there was wafted that little myth which went wandering over the country from house to house: the familiar little myth that he had been rejected. This myth of the rejected!—this little death-web wound about the unsuccessful suitor: every eligible man is as much entitled to one as every caterpillar to his cocoon.