e 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 such a place, as the son o