“You have spoken of marriage,” said I.  “Have you had many wives?”

My host leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling.  “That is a subject,” he said, “of which I think as little as I can, and yet I must speak to you of it.  It is right that I should do so.  I have been married so often that I can scarcely count the wives I have had.  Beautiful women, good women, some of them women to whom I would have given immortality had I been able; but they died, and died, and died.  And here is one of the great drawbacks of living forever.

“Yet it was not always the death of my wives which saddened me the most; it was their power of growing old.  I would marry a young woman, beautiful, charming.  You need not be surprised that I was able to do this, for in all ages woman has been in the habit of disregarding the years of man, and I have always had a youthful spirit; I think it is Daudet who says that the most dangerous lover is the man of fifty-three.  I would live happily with a wife; she would gradually grow to be the same age as myself; and then she would become older and older, and I did not.  As I have said, there were women to whom I would have given immortality if I could; but I will add that there have been times when I would have given up my own immortality to be able to pass gently into old age with a beloved wife.

“You will want to know if I have had descendants.  They exist by the thousand; but if you ask me where they are, I must tell you that I do not know.  I now have but one child, a little girl who is asleep up-stairs.  I have gathered around me families of sons and daughters; they have grown up, married, and my grandchildren have sat upon my knees.  Sometimes, at long intervals, I have known great-grandchildren.  But when my sons and daughters have grown gray and gone to their graves, I have withdrawn myself from the younger people,—­some of whom were not acquainted with me, others even had never heard of me,—­and then by the next generation the old ancestor, if remembered at all, was connected only with the distant past.  And so family after family have melted into the great mass of human beings, and are as completely lost as though they were water thrown into the sea.

“I have always been fond of beautiful women, and as you have met Mrs. Crowder, you know that my disposition has not changed.  Sarah, the wife of Abraham, was considered a woman of great beauty in her day, and the fame of her charms continues; but I assure you that if she lived now her attractions would not have given her husband so much trouble.  I saw a good deal of Sarah when I visited Abraham with my master Alexander, and I have seen many more beautiful women since that time.  Hagar was a fine woman, but she was too dark, and her face had an anxious expression which interfered with her beauty.”

“Was Hagar really the wife of Abraham,” I asked, “as the Mussulmans say, and was Ishmael considered his heir?”