mist-draped sea, more clearly, indeed, than he had ever seen it before.
He understood, moreover, what an unsatisfactory son he must be to a man
like his father--if it had tried, Providence could hardly have furnished
him with offspring more unsuitable. The Colonel had wished him to enter
the Diplomatic Service, or the Army, or at least to get himself called
to the Bar; but although a really brilliant University career and
his family influence would have given him advantages in any of these
professions, he had declined them all. So, following his natural bent,
he became an electrician, and now, abandoning the practical side of
that modest calling, he was an experimental physicist, full of deep but
unremunerative lore, and--an unsuccessful inventor. Certainly he owed
something to his family, and if his father wished that he should marry,
well, marry he must, as a matter of duty, if for no other reason. After
all, the thing was not pressing; for it it came to the point, what woman
was likely to accept him? All he had done to-night was to settle
the general principles in his own mind. When it became necessary--if
ever--he could deal with the details.

And yet this sort of marriage which was proposed to him, was it not an
unholy business? He cared little for women, having no weakness that way,
probably because of the energy which other young men gave to the pursuit
of them was in his case absorbed by intense and brain-exhausting study.
Therefore he was not a man who if left to himself, would marry, as so
many do, merely in order to be married; indeed, the idea to him was
almost repulsive. Had he been a woman-hater, he might have accepted it
more easily, for then to him one would have been as the other. But the
trouble was that he knew and felt that a time might come when in his
eyes one woman would be different from all others, a being who spoke not
to his physical nature only, if at all, but to the core within him. And
if that happened, what then?