full measure. Sentiment? He was no
sentimentalist, but he believed that he possessed the finer quality.
Fidelity? That was not worth consideration. Appreciation of the
deepest and best in her, sympathetic understanding of all her mistakes
and of all that she had suffered? She knew the answer as well as he
did. The ability to meet her in many moods, never to weary her with
monotony? He was a man of many moods himself. What had saved him from
early matrimony was a certain monotony in women, the cleverest of them.

But there must be something beyond, some subtle spiritual demand,
developed throughout nearly twice as many years as he had dwelt on
earth; born not only of an aspiring soul and terrible disenchantments,
but of a wisdom that only years of deep and living experience, no mere
intelligence, however brilliant, could hope to assemble. He was
thirty-four. There was no possible question that at fifty-eight, if he
lived sanely, and his intellectual faculties had progressed unimpaired,
he would look back upon thirty-four as the nonage of life--when the
future was a misty abyss of wisdom whose brink he had barely trod. She
herself was an abyss of wisdom. How in God's name could he ever cross
it? Her body might be young again, but never her mind. Never her
mind! And then he had a flash of insight. Perhaps he alone could
rejuvenate that mind.

Certainly he could make her forget. Men and women would be aged at
thirty, but for this beneficent gift of forgetting. . . . He could
make the present vivid enough.

He explored every nook of those personalities of his, determined to
discover if he felt any sense of inferiority to this woman who knew so
much more, had lived and thought and felt so much more, than
himself--whom he still visioned on a plane above and apart. No woman
was ever more erudite in the most brilliant and informing declensions
of life, whatever the disenchantments, and for thirty years she had
known in varying degrees of intimacy the ablest and most distinguished
men in Europe. She had been at no pains to conceal her opinion of
their intellectual superiority over American men. . . .

He concluded dispassionately that he never could feel inferior to any
woman. Women might arrest the attention of the world with their
talents, change laws and wring a better deal out of life than man had
accorded them in the past, but whatever their gifts and whatever their
achievements they always had been