Page 201 - 401_

200

position to be found for this man, an investment for that. But his
specialty was the solving of problems for young married people.
Young married people fascinated him and their apartments were
almost sacred to him - he knew the story of their love-affair, advised
them where to live and how, and remembered their babies' names.
Toward young wives his attitude was circumspect: he never abused
the trust which their husbands – strangely enough in view of his
unconcealed irregularities – invariably reposed in him.
He came to take a vicarious pleasure in happy marriages, and to
be inspired to an almost equally pleasant melancholy by those that
went astray. Not a season passed that he did not witness the collapse
of an affair that perhaps he himself had fathered. When Paula was
divorced and almost immediately remarried to another Bostonian, he
talked about her to me all one afternoon. He would never love any
one as he had loved Paula, but he insisted that he no longer cared.
"I'll never marry," he came to say; "I've seen too much of it,
and I know a happy marriage is a very rare thing. Besides, I'm too
old."
But he did believe in marriage. Like all men who spring from a
happy and successful marriage, he believed in it passionately –
nothing he had seen would change his belief, his cynicism dissolved
upon it like air. But he did really believe he was too old. At twenty-
eight he began to accept with equanimity the prospect of marrying
without romantic love; he resolutely chose a New York girl of his
own class, pretty, intelligent, congenial, above reproach – and set
about falling in love with her. The things he had said to Paula with
sincerity, to other girls with grace, he could no longer say at all
without smiling, or with the force necessary to convince.
"When I'm forty," he told his friends, "I'll be ripe. I'll fall for
some chorus girl like the rest."
Nevertheless, he persisted in his attempt. His mother wanted to
see him married, and he could now well afford it – he had a seat on
the Stock Exchange, and his earned income came to twenty-five
thousand a year. The idea was agreeable: when his friends – he spent
most of his time with the set he and Dolly had evolved – closed
themselves in behind domestic doors at night, he no longer rejoiced in
his freedom. He even wondered if he should have married Dolly. Not
even Paula had loved him more, and he was learning the rarity, in a
single life, of encountering true emotion.