his old disciple.

"I took a great interest in your marriage, Stewart," he said. "I always
think of you and your wife as two very dear young friends. You must let
me speak to you now as a father might--and probably wouldn't."

Stewart assented with affectionate reverence.

"You are young, but your wife is much younger. A man marries a girl
many years younger than himself and has not the same feeling of
responsibility towards her as he would have towards a young man of the
same age. He seldom considers her youth. Yet his responsibility is much
greater towards her than towards a pupil of the same age; she needs more
help, she will accept more in forming her mind and character. Now you
have married a young lady who is very intelligent, very pleasing; but
she has a delicate nervous system, and it has been overstrained. She
lets this peculiar weakness of her memory get on her nerves. You have
nerves yourself, you have imagination, and you let your mind give way to
hers. That's not wise; it's not right. Let her feel that these moods do
not affect you; be sure that they do not. What matters mainly is that
your mutual love should remain unchanged. When your wife finds that her
happiness, her real happiness, is quite untouched by these changes of
mood, she will leave off attributing an exaggerated importance to them.
So will you, Stewart. You will see them in their right proportion; you
will see the great evil and danger of giving way to imagination, of
accepting perverse psychological hypotheses as guides in life. Reason
and Religion are the only true guides."

The Master did not utter these sayings continuously. There were pauses
which Stewart might have filled, but he did not offer to do so. The
spell of his old teacher's mind and aspect was upon him. His spirit was,
as it were, bowed before his Master in a kind of humility.

He walked home with a lightened heart, feeling somewhat as a devout
sinner might feel to whom his confessor had given absolution. For about
twenty-four hours this mood lasted. Then he confronted the fact that the
beloved Master's advice had been largely, though not altogether, futile,
because it had not dealt with actuality. And Ian Stewart saw himself to
be moving in the plain, ordinary world of men as solitary as a ghost
which vainly endeavors to make its presence and its needs recognized.

CHAPTER XIX

Tims had ceased to be an inhabitant of Oxford. She was studying
physiology in London