d become tangled up--of one in particular whose bank
account had been powerless to extricate him.... And he was ashamed of
himself.

In view of the nature of his sex experience, of his habit of applying his
imagination solely to matters of business rather than to affairs of the
heart,--if his previous episodes may be so designated,--his failure to
surmise that a wish for marriage might be at the back of her resistance
is not so surprising as it may seem; he laid down, half smoked, his third
cigar. The suspicion followed swiftly on his recalling to mind her
vehement repudiation of his proffered gifts did he think she wanted what
he could buy for her! She was not purchasable--that way. He ought to have
known it, he hadn't realized what he was saying. But marriage! Literally
it had never occurred to him to image her in a relation he himself
associated with shackles. One of the unconscious causes of his
fascination was just her emancipation from and innocence of that
herd-convention to which most women--even those who lack wedding
rings--are slaves. The force of such an appeal to a man of Ditmar's type
must not be underestimated. And the idea that she, too, might prefer the
sanction of the law, the gilded cage as a popular song which once had
taken his fancy illuminatingly expressed it--seemed utterly incongruous
with the freedom and daring of her spirit, was a sobering shock. Was he
prepared to marry her, if he could obtain her in no other way? The
question demanded a survey of his actual position of which he was at the
moment incapable. There were his children! He had never sought to arrive
at even an approximate estimate of the boy and girl as factors in his
life, to consider his feelings toward them; but now, though he believed
himself a man who gave no weight to social considerations--he had scorned
this tendency in his wife--he was to realize the presence of ambitions
for them. He was young, he was astonishingly successful; he had reason to
think, with his opportunities and the investments he already had made,
that he might some day be moderately rich; and he had at times even
imagined himself in later life as the possessor of one of those elaborate
country places to be glimpsed from the high roads in certain localities,
which the sophisticated are able to recognize as the seats of the
socially ineligible, but which to Ditmar were outward and visible emblems
of success. He liked to think of George as the inheritor of s