“Louis!” exclaimed his sister, bewildered; “what in the world are you lecturing about?  Why, to hear you expound the anatomy of love—­”

He began to laugh, caught her hands, and kissed her: 

“Little goose, that was all impromptu and horribly trite and commonplace.  Only it was new to me because I never before took the trouble to consider it.  But it’s true, even if it is trite.  People love or they don’t love, and a regard for ethics controls only what they do about it.”

“That’s another Tupperesque truism, isn’t it, dear?”

“Sure thing.  Who am I to mock at the Proverbial One when I’ve never yet evolved anything better?...  Listen; you don’t want me to marry Stephanie, do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t.  You think you do—­”

“I do, I do, Louis!  She’s the sweetest, finest, most generous, most suitable—­”

“Sure,” he said, hastily, “she’s all that except ’suitable’—­and she isn’t that, and I’m not, either.  For the love of Mike, Lily, let me go on admiring her, even loving her in a perfectly harmless—­”

“It isn’t harmless to caress a girl—­”

“Why—­you can’t call it caressing—­”

“What do you call it?”

“Nothing.  We’ve always been on an intimate footing.  She’s perfectly unembarrassed about—­whatever impulsive—­er—­fugitive impulses—­”

“You do kiss her!”

“Seldom—­very seldom.  At moments the conditions happen accidentally to—­suggest—­some slight demonstration—­of a very warm friendship—­”

“You positively sicken me!  Do you think a nice girl is going to let a man paw her if she doesn’t consider him pledged to her?”

“I don’t think anything about it.  Nice girls have done madder things than their eulogists admit.  As a plain matter of fact you can’t tell what anybody nice is going to do under theoretical circumstances.  And the nicer they are the bigger the gamble—­particularly if they’re endowed with brains—­”

“That’s cynicism.  You seem to be developing several streaks—­”

“Polite blinking of facts never changes them.  Conforming to conventional and accepted theories never yet appealed to intelligence.  I’m not going to be dishonest with myself; that’s one of the streaks I’ve developed.  You ask me if I love Stephanie enough to marry her, and I say I don’t.  What’s the good of blinking it?  I don’t love anybody enough to marry ’em; but I like a number of girls well enough to spoon with them.”

“That is disgusting!”

“No, it isn’t,” he said, with smiling weariness; “it’s the unvarnished truth about the average man.  Why wink at it?  The average man can like a lot of girls enough to spoon and sentimentalise with them.  It’s the pure accident of circumstance and environment that chooses for him the one he marries.  There are myriads of others in the world with whom, under proper circumstances and environment, he’d have been just as happy—­often happier.  Choice is a mystery, constancy a gamble, discontent the one best bet.  It isn’t pleasant; it isn’t nice fiction and delightful romance; it isn’t poetry or precept as it is popularly inculcated; it’s the brutal truth about the average man....  And I’m going to find Stephanie.  Have you any objection?”