But
existence flatly refused to be simple. He desired love in a cottage with
Eve. He could have bought a hundred cottages, all in ideal surroundings.
The mere fact, however, that he was in a position to buy a hundred
cottages somehow made it impossible for him to devote himself
exclusively to loving Eve in one cottage....

His imagination leaped over intervening events and he pictured the
wedding of Sissie as a nightmare of complications--no matter whom she
married. He loathed weddings. Of course a girl of Sissie's sense and
modernity ought to insist on being married in a registry office. But
would she? She would not. For a month previous to marriage all girls
cast off modernity and became Victorian. Yes, she would demand real
orange-blossom and everything that went with it.... He got as far as
wishing that Sissie might grow into an old maid, solely that he might be
spared the wearing complications incident to the ceremony of marriage as
practised by intelligent persons in the twentieth century. His character
was deteriorating, and he could not stop it from deteriorating....

Then Sissie herself came very silently into the room.

"Sit down, my dear. I want to talk to you," he said in his most
ingratiating and sympathetic tones. And in quite another tone he
addressed her silently: "It's time I taught you a thing or two, my
wench."

"Yes, father," she responded charmingly to his wily ingratiatingness,
and sat down.

"If you were the ordinary girl," he began, "I shouldn't say a word. It
would be no use. But you aren't. And I flatter myself I'm not the
ordinary father. You are in love. Or you think you are. Which is the
same thing--for the present. It's a fine thing to be in love. I'm quite
serious. I like you tremendously just for being in love. Yes, I do. Now
I know something about being in love. You've got enough imagination to
realise that, and I want you to realise it. I want you to realise that I
know a bit more about love than you do. Stands to reason, doesn't it?"

"Yes, father," said Sissie, placidly respectful.

"Love has got one drawback. It very gravely impairs the critical
faculty. You think you can judge our friend Oswald with perfect
impartiality. You think you see him as he is. But if you will exercise
your imagination you will admit that you can't. You perceive that, don't
you?"

"Quite, dad," the adorable child concurred.

"Well, do you know anything about him, really?"

"Not much, father."