'You don't imagine I should tell you if I were not, do you?' she said also with the light touch. 'Of course I am!' "Then I suppose that if I asked you to outline the personal characteristics of, let us say, the sort of man one's daughter should choose in order to have a high prospect of a happy marriage — why, then you would just hand me back a quick sketch of His Excellency, your husband, would n't you?'

'Of course I should,' she replied without hesitation. 'I am proud of Oliver. He has made a place for himself in public life. Men like him- he has - he has hosts of men friends; and his relatives are all suitable people. He has been able to provide amply and even lavishly for the comfort of his family, and has given us the advantage of years of foreign travel and residence. He cares a good deal for appearances; but so do I. He likes to live expensively; but he knows how to live. And he is never, like so many men with careers, too busy to live or to let other people live-unless they can be swept into the stream of the monster's ambition. He is never too busy to enjoy what he is doing.' 'Astonishing virtue, in the circumstances!' groaned my envy.

'And then he is generous to us all and reasonably tolerant, and really kind-hearted and sympathetic with people that he likes; and he and the children positively adore each other. I like that in him. His temper has its stormy seasons, but for the most part it is gay; and even when he is very angry he is rather entertaining. He has so much humor that he seldom bores himself, and so much intelligence that he seldom bores anyone else. Everything

in the world and at home seems to interest him vividly. He thinks of something new to do or to say every morning of his life. Whatever man or woman he meets seems to be the one person in the world that he was hoping to meet at that moment; but I think he actually does n't care very much for women, except in their purely decorative aspects. Sometimes he is a little exacting, but he is generally appreciative; and he has very nice ways of remembering birthdays and anniversaries. And then, in tight places, he always does the right thing; in a crisis one can rely on him.'

'Cornelia,' I said, clipping a row of flame-weed with my stick, as we quickened our pace, 'I have just passed through a terrible minute. You know that Oliver is the only man in the world that I envy. I have been checking off each trait of his against my own, and absolutely the only trait that I have in common with this happinessproducing paragon is that my temper, too, has "stormy seasons.'

'If it's as important as that 'she said, relenting a little in her stride. 'But don't you like to walk fast? Nothing makes me so happy.'

'I have a theory,' I said. 'One can't walk fast when one has a theory. It's a theory for which you are partly, perhaps mainly, responsible.'

"Then it is n't horrid, is it?'

'Oh no! It is very nice indeed. But even now, while we delay, it has grown into three theories. In the first place, there are no perfect husbands, and there is probably only one perfect wife. In the second place, happiness is in neither wives nor husbands, but only in the relation between. In the third place, people who are unhappy in marriage are so, usually, because they don't know how to give themselves to each other. In the fourth place, it's four now, that unhappy ignorance is chiefly due to erroneous conceptions of the self.'

'Just what do you mean by the self?' she said. 'My metaphysical brains are weak.'

'Well, the traditional, romantic, and generally popular conception is that the self is a very deep and precious mystery of "the buried life," an elusive being hidden away inside, — always inside, in a secret garden of the personality, where it murmurs to itself the most delightful and ineffable secrets, which can be communicated to any other self only in a mystical physical fusion of selves — or confusion of selves.'

'Yes,' said Cornelia, 'I understand that. It is something like the religious or sacramental theory of marriage, is n't it?'

'Something like some people's notion of it,' I replied. 'But please follow this argument. Under the illusion that the self is such a being, and only so to be come at, romantic lovers fret themselves to a fever, and decadent heroes and heroines tear each other to bits, and ignorant contemporary husbands and wives separate with bitter recriminations, each charging that the mys teriously rewarding self sought in the other was not to be found.' 'Well?'

'Well, the reason it was not found is that it was not there. There is no such secret garden; there is no such mysterious self to reward the mystics of the romantic quest.'

'Don't you think so?'

'No,' I said. 'I think, up to a certain point, our brutal modern naturalists have followed truth much more faithfully than the poets. And I believe that in educating our young people we had better follow them to the same point. My novelist friend is right in holding to his theory that Judith O'Grady and the Colonel's lady are much the same beneath the skin.'

'Bah!' cried Cornelia. 'If you say that again, I shall hate you.'

'And I shall ask to be forgiven,' I said, and you will forgive me so graciously that I shall sin again. But I'm very serious about this. Judith and the lady are very much the same beneath the skin.'

'I hate you!' Cornelia cried. 'I could stick you full of pins.'

'Beneath the skin,' I continued, 'Judith and the lady consist of closely similar metabolic apparatus and so forth, and a certain amount of vacant space and nothing else. And since the apparatus is the same, there is

every reason to believe that it functions in essentially the same way in performing the duties assigned to it by biological destiny.'

'You are disgusting,' said Cornelia. 'If I dwelt too long on the point, I should be,' I agreed. 'Viscera and vacancy: that is what Judith and the lady have beneath the skin. And that is why I think the naturalistic novelists. are foolish if they dwell too long there.'

'Is this your nice theory?'

'No,' I said, 'it is n't; but it is a sort of basis for my theory. First, we establish the fact that the interesting and precious and desirable self is n't "inside." Then, don't you see, it must be outside. Well, it is outside. It does n't exist till it gets outside. All the differentiation, the distinction, the qualities, which you and I value, are outside and are created by means analogous to the means of art. In so far as people-any people, married or otherwise, really give themselves adequately to each other in love or in friendship, and impart happiness with the gift, they give a self that is externalized, objectified, and tangibleso to speak in some form of useful or - beautiful activity, which occasions no insatiable and consuming fever, but the real joy of benefits given and received and the delight of a loveliness that descends on the contemplative eye like the free grace of God.'

"Your theory improves,' said Cornelia; 'I don't wholly understand it; but it improves.'

VI

The foam was now running high up the beach. I splashed straight through it, in spite of my shoes. But Cornelia, lighter footed, danced with it like a partner in some fantastic minuet, returning to my side and my argument only when the creamy gliding meander ebbed.

'A man's power to impart his best self depends,' I said, 'on the woman's power to receive it.'

'Of course,' said Cornelia. 'All that any man, even a genius, asks of his wife is intelligence enough to appreciate him.'

'No,' I said, 'that is n't true. That is going by. There was a time when a husband thought of himself as the pianist, and of his wife as standing behind him to turn the pages of his music. But nowadays we begin to think that the ideal concert is by two performers on perfectly synchronized independent instruments not soloist and accompanist, but, say, organist and pianist, each as important as the other.'

'Nonsense!' said Cornelia. 'We shall never expect that. But we do like our accompaniment to be applauded when we play well- and especially when we don't.'

'If there is one subject in the world,' I said, veering a point, ‘about which I am more densely ignorant than another, it is women, and what they really like.' "That's quite true,' she lilted. 'But I knew a lady once.' 'Still another lady?'

'A most exquisite lady. And I often wondered why, whenever "the idea of her life" came into my "study of imagination" I invariably saw her in a setting, as if the setting were an organic part of herself.'

'Well, it is, is n't it if one puts a little effort into it, to make it right. It is in the setting is n't it that one has one's opportunity to express what you call the self. It is in one's husband, children, friends, and one's home and habits and things and so on.'

'Yes, but in the case of this lady there was a curious point about the setting. Wherever she was seemed to be the centre of the picture. She always seemed to frame.'

'What an attitudinizer she must have been!'

'She was not. It was only, I think, that she seemed to bring out and accentuate everything near her that harmonized with her own vibrant and articulate life. When I saw her in her drawing-room, it framed her; and she appeared as fine and finished as if she had stepped from a canvas of Watteau's. Her books and pictures and tapestries became as intimately hers as her garments, so that I have felt her almost visibly present in that room even when she was not there. Sometimes, in a perverse mood, I have said, "This is all a pose"; and, trying to go behind the elaborate expressiveness of her artificial surroundings and to tease her out of perfection, I have gone on rough walks with her in woods and in the open, half hoping that she might revert to the inarticulate pathos of Nature. But the instant she stepped from the frame of art she stepped into the frame of the landscape; the greensward spread itself before her like Ralegh's cloak; groves offered themselves for a background; and I finally concluded that if she came up out of the sea, like Botticelli's Cytherea, the sea would clothe her and her pearly radiance appear but an extension of the lustrous nacre of some deep-sea shell.'

"You are fanciful,' said Cornelia.

'I am not fanciful,' I replied. 'I express just as simply as I can with words my sense of the quite blessed outwardness and availability of this lady's self. I don't think she knew it, but - '

'But that shows how ignorant you are of women,' she said, and swept me again sidelong with her gray eyes.

'But whether she knew it or not,' I reasoned, 'she possesses a secret of communicating happiness — a kind of happiness which I can describe only as pure serenity at concert pitch. Perhaps she was merely born in tune with some

fine instrument which the rest of us rarely hear. Perhaps she is right, after all, in thinking of the art and discipline of the traditional lady and the traditional gentleman as the technique by which the true and precious selves of our fellow creatures are most likely to get themselves expressed.'

'I believe,' said Cornelia, 'your theory is coming out rather well, and in time for tea.'

'My only reason for elaborating my theory is that it is based upon the practice of a lady whose theory is infinitely surpassed by her art.'

'Is it indeed?' she said.

"When I got the theory built, I was planning to say that I should wish a daughter to choose for her husband neither one of the sheik-monsters who of late have been devouring our damsels, nor yet the inexpressive and unmodified vestrymen whom you commended to our admiration this morning, but rather a youth who should have a bit of the old bachelor's conception of what might be in the relation — an old bachelor, I mean, who had known, in his own youth, an exquisite lady.'

'Why lug in the old bachelor?' Cornelia asked Cornelia asked a little cruelly; for we were already at her door.

'Because,' I said, as she waited on the step for my leave-taking, 'because time and meditation and the naturalistic novelists have convinced him that, almost without a pang, he may resign to Mr. O'Grady and the Colonel the similarities of Judith and the lady, provided only that, from time to time, he may refresh his memory and his senses with the lady's differences.' 'Meaning -'

'Why, meaning that the kind of man whom a girl like Dorothy should choose should know that the passion hymned by the naturalists is naught, sheer naught — '

'You really mean that?'