“But whether she knew it or not,” I reasoned, “she possesses a secret of communicating happiness—a kind of happiness which I can only describe as pure serenity at concert pitch. Perhaps she was merely born in tune with some fine instrument which the rest of us rarely hear. Perhaps she is right, after all, in thinking of the art and discipline of the traditional lady and the traditional gentleman as the technique by which the true and precious selves of our fellow creatures are most likely to get themselves expressed.”
“I believe,” said Cornelia, “that your theory is coming out rather well, and in time for tea.”
“My only reason for elaborating my theory is, that it is based upon the practice of a lady whose theory is infinitely surpassed by her art.”
“Is it, indeed?” she said.
“When I got the theory built, I was planning to say that I should wish a daughter to choose for her husband neither one of the sheik-monsters who of late have been devouring our damsels, nor yet the inexpressive and unmodified vestryman whom you commended to our admiration this morning, but rather a youth who should have a bit of the old bachelor’s conception of what might be in the relation—an old bachelor, I mean, who had known in his own youth, an exquisite lady.”
“Why lug in the old bachelor?” Cornelia asked—a little cruelly; for we were already at her door.
“Because,” I said, as she waited on the step for my leave-taking, “because time and meditation and the naturalistic novelists have convinced him that, almost without a pang, he may resign to Mr. O’Grady and the Colonel the similarities of Judith and the lady, provided only that, from time to time, he may refresh his memory and his senses with the lady’s differences.”
“Meaning—”
“Why, meaning that the kind of man whom a girl like Dorothy should choose should know that the passion hymned by the naturalists is naught, sheer naught—”
“You really mean that?”