But Tyson was not thinking of Mrs. Hathaway.

“I mean that baby—­Molly—­my wife.  That was the wickedest, cruellest thing I ever did in the whole course of my abominable life.  I might have known how it would end.”

Stanistreet looked thoughtfully at his friend.  He was used to these outbursts of self-reproach, but they had never moved him greatly until now.

“They told me I ought to have married a clever woman. She wasn’t clever, thank God!  Yet somehow she had a sort of originality—­I don’t know what it was.” (Tyson had lately fallen into the habit of talking about his wife in the past tense, as if she were dead.) “It was something that no clever woman ever has. I know them!  Upon my soul I do believe I loved her.”  He paused, pondering.  “I wonder how it would have answered though if I’d married a thing with more brains?”

“Brains?  They’re damnation.  Are you thinking of Miss Batchelor?”

“N-no.  There is a medium.  A woman needn’t be a fool or a philosopher, nor yet a saint or a devil.  It exists somewhere, that golden mean.”

“Oh, no doubt.”

“It’s odd how that notion of the perfect woman sticks to you.  How the devil did I get hold of it, I wonder?”

Stanistreet made no answer.  It was sufficiently evident that Tyson had got it from his wife.  The odd thing was that Tyson was unaware of this.  He seemed to have no doubt whatever that his marriage with the perfect woman had been arranged for in heaven, though somehow it had failed to come off on earth.  A delusion not uncommon with men of Tyson’s stamp.

“I believe,” said Tyson, “it’s a what d’ye call ’em—­category—­innate idea—­a priori form of the masculine intelligence.  I’ve never seen a man yet who hadn’t it somewhere about him.  And I’ve seen most sorts.  Terrific bounders, too, some of them.”

A year ago Stanistreet would have laughed at this, now he smiled.

Tyson lay back in his chair and fell into a waking dream.  He spoke slowly, in the curious muffled voice of the dreamer.  “The perfect woman—­the eternal, incomprehensible divinity, all-wise, all-good, all-loving, the guardian of the soul—­I believe in it, I adore it; but, unfortunately, I have never met it.”

“My dear Tyson, I doubt if you and I would know it if we did meet it.”

Tyson said nothing.  He had closed his eyelids.  He was following his dream.

Presently he spoke.

“I say, Stanistreet, do you believe in miracles?”

Stanistreet looked down.  Only the other day he had seen a miracle and believed.  And he himself was a greater miracle than the one he saw.  But the experience was not one that he cared to talk about.

“They don’t happen here, where people are so damned clever.  But I know that they happen—­sometimes—­over there—­in the East—­ex oriente lux.”

He rose.  “Some day I shall go there or thereabouts, and see.”