powers of concentration, blunt his extraordinary special faculties,
perhaps even introduce an element of calculation and actual
cowardice before great alternatives, and so shadow his powers and
modify his future success. But now, ten years later, he thought
otherwise, found himself willing to receive impressions, ready even
to woo and wed if the right girl should present herself. He dreamed
of some well-educated woman who would lighten his own ignorance of
many branches of knowledge.

A man in this receptive mood is not asked as a rule to wait long for
the needful response; but Brendon was old-fashioned and the women
born of the war attracted him not at all. He recognized their fine
qualities and often their distinction of mind; yet his ideal struck
backward to another and earlier type--the type of his own mother
who, as a widow, had kept house for him until her death. She was his
feminine ideal--restful, sympathetic, trustworthy--one who always
made his interests hers, one who concentrated upon his life rather
than her own and found in his progress and triumphs the salt of her
own existence.

Mark wanted, in truth, somebody who would be content to merge
herself in him and seek neither to impress her own personality upon
his, nor develop an independent environment. He had wit to know a
mother's standpoint must be vastly different from that of any wife,
no matter how perfect her devotion; he had experience enough of
married men to doubt whether the woman he sought was to be found in
a post-war world; yet he preserved and permitted himself a hope that
the old-fashioned women still existed, and he began to consider
where he might find such a helpmate.