personality must be the central prop and pillar, for even anything as
unsubstantial as an air-castle has its building law. One must rear
around something, or the structure can never rise above the horizon
of the future.

Anderson had stored his mind with the poetic facts of the world
rather than projected his poetic fancies into the facts of the world.
He saw things largely as they were, with no inflorescence of rainbows
where there was none; but there are actual rainbows, and even
auroras, so that the man who does not dream has compensations and a
less chance of disillusion. Of course Anderson had thought of
marriage; he could scarcely have done otherwise; but he had thought
of it as an abstract condition pertaining to himself only in a
general way as it pertains to all mankind. He had never seen himself
plainly enough in his fancy as a lover and husband to have a pang of
regret or longing. He had been really contented as he was. He had a
powerful mind, and the exercising of that held in restraint the
purely physical which might have precipitated matters. Some men
advance, the soul pushing the body with more or less effort; some
with the soul first, trailing the body; some in unison, and these are
they who make the best progress as to the real advancement. Anderson
moved, on the whole, in the last way. He was a very healthy man, mind
and body, and with rather unusual advantages in point of looks. This
last he realized in one way but not in another. He knew it on general
principles; he recognized the fact as he recognized the fact of his
hands and feet; but what he actually saw in the looking-glass was not
so much the physical fact of himself as the spiritual problem with
its two known quantities of need and circumstance, and its great
unknown third which took hold of eternity. Anderson, although not in
a sense religious, had a religious trend of thought. He went every