We sat in silence for a little while—for longer, perhaps, than it seemed to us—Dan in the chair opposite to me, each of us occupied with his own thoughts.
“You have an excellent agent,” said Dan; “retain her services as long as you can. She possesses the great advantage of having no conscience, as regards your affairs. Women never have where they—”
He broke off to stir the fire.
“You like her?” I asked. The words sounded feeble. It is only the writer who fits the language to the emotion; the living man more often selects by contrast.
“She is my ideal woman,” returned Dan; “true and strong and tender; clear as crystal, pure as dawn. Like her!”
He knocked the ashes from his pipe. “We do not marry our ideals,” he went on. “We love with our hearts, not with our souls. The woman I shall marry”—he sat gazing into the fire, a smile upon his face—“she will be some sweet, clinging, childish woman, David Copperfield's Dora. Only I am not Doady, who always seems to me to have been somewhat of a—He reminds me of you, Paul, a little. Dickens was right; her helplessness, as time went on, would have bored him more and more instead of appealing to him.”
“And the women,” I suggested, “do they marry their ideals?”
He laughed. “Ask them.”
“The difference between men and women,” he continued, “is very slight; we exaggerate it for purposes of art. What sort of man do you suppose he is, Norah's ideal? Can't you imagine him?—But I can tell you the type of man she will marry, ay, and love with all her heart.”
He looked at me from under his strong brows drawn down, a twinkle in his eye.