There was indeed one part of Isabel’s theology that Charlton would have much liked to possess.  He had accepted the idea of an Absolute God.  A personal, sympathizing, benevolent Providence was in his opinion one of the illusions of the theologic stage of human development.  Things happened by inexorable law, he said.  And in the drowning of Katy he saw only the overloading of a boat and the inevitable action of water upon the vital organs of the human system.  It seemed to him now an awful thing that such great and terrible forces should act irresistibly and blindly.  He wished he could find some ground upon which to base a different opinion.  He would like to have had Isabel’s faith in the Paternity of God and in the immortality of the soul.  But he was too honest with himself to suffer feeling to exert any influence on his opinions.  He was in the logical stage of his development, and built up his system after the manner of the One-Hoss Shay.  Logically he could not see sufficient ground to change, and he scorned the weakness that would change an opinion because of feeling.  His soul might cry out in its depths for a Father in the universe.  But what does Logic care for a Soul or its cry?  After a while a wider experience brings in something better than Logic.  This is Philosophy.  And Philosophy knows what Logic can not learn, that reason is not the only faculty by which truth is apprehended—­that the hungers and intuitions of the Soul are worth more than syllogisms.

Do what he would, Charlton could not conceal from himself that in sympathy Miss Minorkey was greatly deficient.  She essayed to show feeling, but she had little to show.  It was not her fault.  Do you blame the dahlia for not having the fragrance of a tuberose?  It is the most dangerous quality of enthusiastic young men and women that they are able to deceive themselves.  Nine tenths of all conjugal disappointments come from the ability of people in love to see more in those they love than ever existed there.  That love is blind is a fable.  He has an affection of the eyes, but it is not blindness.  Nobody else ever sees so much as he does.  For here was Albert Charlton, bound by his vows to Helen Minorkey, with whom he had nothing in common, except in intellect, and already his sorrow was disclosing to him the shallowness of her nature, and the depth of his own; even now he found that she had no voice with which to answer his hungry cry for sympathy.  Already his betrothal was becoming a fetter, and his great mistake was disclosing itself to him.  The rude suspicion had knocked at his door before, but he had been able to bar it out.  Now it stared at him in the night, and he could not rid himself of it.  But he was still far enough from accepting the fact that the intellectual Helen Minorkey was destitute of all unselfish feeling.  For Charlton was still in love with her.  When one has fixed heart and hope and thought on a single person, love does not die with the first consciousness of disappointment.  Love can subsist a long time on old associations.  Besides, Miss Minorkey was not aggressively or obtrusively selfish—­she never interfered with anybody else.  But there is a cool-blooded indifference that can be moved by no consideration outside the Universal Ego.  That was Helen.