Usually Randolph Anderson would no more have hesitated about giving his opinion as to a girl’s looks than he would have hesitated about giving his candid opinion of the weather.  For the most part a woman’s face had about as much effect upon his emotional nature as the face of a day.  He saw that it was rosy or gray, smiling and sunny, or frowning or rainy, then he looked unmovedly at the retreating backs of both.  It was all the same thing.  Anderson was a man who dealt mostly with actualities where his emotions were concerned.  With some, love-dreams grow and develop with their growth and development; with some not.  The latter had been true with Randolph Anderson.  Then, too, he was scarcely self-centred and egotistical enough for genuine air-castles of any kind.  To build an air-castle, one’s own personality must be the central prop and pillar, for even anything as unsubstantial as an air-castle has its building law.  One must rear around something, or the structure can never rise above the horizon of the future.

Anderson had stored his mind with the poetic facts of the world rather than projected his poetic fancies into the facts of the world.  He saw things largely as they were, with no inflorescence of rainbows where there was none; but there are actual rainbows, and even auroras, so that the man who does not dream has compensations and a less chance of disillusion.  Of course Anderson had thought of marriage; he could scarcely have done otherwise; but he had thought of it as an abstract condition pertaining to himself only in a general way as it pertains to all mankind.  He had never seen himself plainly enough in his fancy as a lover and husband to have a pang of regret or longing.  He had been really contented as he was.  He had a powerful mind, and the exercising of that held in restraint the purely physical which might have precipitated matters.  Some men advance, the soul pushing the body with more or less effort; some with the soul first, trailing the body; some in unison, and these are they who make the best progress as to the real advancement.  Anderson moved, on the whole, in the last way.  He was a very healthy man, mind and body, and with rather unusual advantages in point of looks.  This last he realized in one way but not in another.  He knew it on general principles; he recognized the fact as he recognized the fact of his hands and feet; but what he actually saw in the looking-glass was not so much the physical fact of himself as the spiritual problem with its two known quantities of need and circumstance, and its great unknown third which took hold of eternity.  Anderson, although not in a sense religious, had a religious trend of thought.  He went every Sunday with his mother to the Presbyterian church where his grandfather had preached to an earlier generation.

On the Sunday after his encounter with Arthur Carroll with reference to the bill, he went to church as usual with his mother.