“I'm sure you always have, father,” said the son.
The father did not respond. “I wish you could remember your mother when she was well,” he said. Presently he added, “I think it isn't best for a woman to be too much in love with her husband.”
Dan took this to himself, and he laughed harshly. “She's been able to dissemble her love at last.”
His father went on, “Women keep the romantic feeling longer than men; it dies out of us very soon—perhaps too soon.”
“You think I couldn't have come to time?” asked Dan. “Well, as it's turned out, I won't have to.”
“No man can be all a woman wishes him to be,” said his father. “It's better for the disappointment to come before it's too late.”
“I was to blame,” said Dan stoutly. “She was all right.”
“You were to blame in the particular instance,” his father answered. “But in general the fault was in her—or her temperament. As long as the romance lasted she might have deluded herself, and believed you were all she imagined you; but romance can't last, even with women. I don like your faults, and I don't want you to excuse them to yourself. I don't like your chancing things, and leaving them to come out all right of themselves; but I've always tried to make you children see all your qualities in their true proportion and relation.”
“Yes; I know that, sir,” said Dan.
“Perhaps,” continued his father, as they swung easily along, shoulder to shoulder, “I may have gone too far in that direction because I was afraid that you might take your mother too seriously in the other—that you might not understand that she judged you from her nerves and not her convictions. It's part of her malady, of her suffering, that her inherited Puritanism clouds her judgment, and makes her see all faults as of one size and equally damning. I wish you to know that she was not always so, but was once able to distinguish differences in error, and to realise that evil is of ill-will.”