his words, but feeling his life to be now
broken and cast away, there seemed to arise some reasons for an
examination of his father's words. They could not mean anything else
than that a young man was following the natural instincts if he lingered
about a young girl's room; and that to be without this instinct was
almost a worse misfortune than to be possessed by it to the practical
exclusion of other interests.

His father, it is true, may have argued the matter out with himself
somewhat in this fashion: that love of women in a man may be controlled;
and looking back into his own life he may have found this view
confirmed. Joseph remembered that his grandmother often spoke to him of
Dan's great love of his wife, and it might be that he had never loved
another woman; few men, however, were as fortunate as his father, and
Joseph could not help thinking that it were better to put women out of
his mind altogether than to become inflamed by the sight of every woman.
He believed that was why he had always kept all thoughts of women out of
his mind; but it seemed to him now that a wife would break the monotony
that he saw in front of him, and were he to meet a woman such as his
father seems to have met he might take her to live with him. He thought
of himself as her husband, though he was by no means sure that married
life was a possible makeshift for the life he sought and was obliged to
forgo, but as life seemed an obligation from which he could not
reasonably escape he thought he would like to share it with some woman
who would give him children. His father desired grandchildren, and since
he had partly sacrificed his life for his father's sake, he might, it
seemed to him, sacrifice himself wholly. But could he? That did not
depend altogether on himself, and with the view to discovering the turn
of his sex instinct he called to mind all the women he had seen, asking
himself as each rose up before him if he could marry her. There were
some that seemed nearer to his desire than others, and it was with the
view to honourable marriage that he called upon his friends, and his
father's friends, and passed his eyes over all their daughters; but the
girl whose image had lingered more pleasantly than any other in his
memory had married lately, and all the others inspired only a physical
aversion which he felt none would succeed in overcoming. He had seen
some Greek women, and been attracted in a way, for they were not too
like the