le
annoyed with my would-be son-in-law. If the relation were achieved it
would give him no prescriptive right to bully me; and we were still in
very early anticipation of that.

'Ah!' he said disarmingly. 'Don't let us quarrel. I'm sorry you think
that; because it isn't likely to bring your favour to my project, and
I want you friendly and helpful. Oh, confound it!' he exclaimed, with
sudden temper. 'You ought to be. I don't understand this aloofness.
I half suspect it's pose. You undervalue Cecily--well, you have no
business to undervalue me. You know me better than anybody in the world.
Now are you going to help me to marry your daughter?'

'I don't think so,' I said slowly, after a moment's silence, which he
sat through like a mutinous schoolboy. 'I might tell you that I don't
care a button whom you marry, but that would not be true. I do care more
or less. As you say, I know you pretty well. I'd a little rather you
didn't make a mess of it; and if you must I should distinctly prefer
not to have the spectacle under my nose for the rest of my life. I can't
hinder you, but I won't help you.'

'And what possesses you to imagine that in marrying Cecily I should make
a mess of it? Shouldn't your first consideration be whether SHE would?'

'Perhaps it should, but, you see, it isn't. Cecily would be happy with
anybody who made her comfortable. You would ask a good deal more than
that, you know.'

Dacres, at this, took me up promptly. Life, he said, the heart of life,
had particularly little to say to temperament. By the heart of life I
suppose he meant married love. He explained that its roots asked other
sustenance, and that it throve best of all on simple elemental goodness.
So long as a man sought in women mere casual companionship, perhaps
the most exquisite thing to be experienced was the stimulus of some
spiritual feminine counterpart; but when he desired of one woman that
she should be always and intimately with him, the background of his
life, the mother of his children, he was better advised to avoid
nerves and sensibilities, and try for the repose of the common--the
uncommon--domestic virtues. Ah, he said, they were sweet, like lavender.
(Already, I told him, he smelled the housekeeper's linen-chest.) But
I did not interrupt him much; I couldn't, he was too absorbed. To
temperamental pairing, he declared, the century owed its breed of
decadents. I asked him if he had ever really recognized one; and he
retort