In view of the nature of his sex experience, of his habit of applying his imagination solely to matters of business rather than to affairs of the heart,—­if his previous episodes may be so designated,—­his failure to surmise that a wish for marriage might be at the back of her resistance is not so surprising as it may seem; he laid down, half smoked, his third cigar.  The suspicion followed swiftly on his recalling to mind her vehement repudiation of his proffered gifts did he think she wanted what he could buy for her!  She was not purchasable—­that way.  He ought to have known it, he hadn’t realized what he was saying.  But marriage!  Literally it had never occurred to him to image her in a relation he himself associated with shackles.  One of the unconscious causes of his fascination was just her emancipation from and innocence of that herd-convention to which most women—­even those who lack wedding rings—­are slaves.  The force of such an appeal to a man of Ditmar’s type must not be underestimated.  And the idea that she, too, might prefer the sanction of the law, the gilded cage as a popular song which once had taken his fancy illuminatingly expressed it—­seemed utterly incongruous with the freedom and daring of her spirit, was a sobering shock.  Was he prepared to marry her, if he could obtain her in no other way?  The question demanded a survey of his actual position of which he was at the moment incapable.  There were his children!  He had never sought to arrive at even an approximate estimate of the boy and girl as factors in his life, to consider his feelings toward them; but now, though he believed himself a man who gave no weight to social considerations—­he had scorned this tendency in his wife—­he was to realize the presence of ambitions for them.  He was young, he was astonishingly successful; he had reason to think, with his opportunities and the investments he already had made, that he might some day be moderately rich; and he had at times even imagined himself in later life as the possessor of one of those elaborate country places to be glimpsed from the high roads in certain localities, which the sophisticated are able to recognize as the seats of the socially ineligible, but which to Ditmar were outward and visible emblems of success.  He liked to think of George as the inheritor of such a place, as the son of a millionaire, as a “college graduate,” as an influential man of affairs; he liked to imagine Amy as the wife of such another.  In short, Ditmar’s wife had left him, as an unconscious legacy, her aspirations for their children’s social prestige....

The polished oak grandfather’s clock in the hall had struck one before he went to bed, mentally wearied by an unwonted problem involving, in addition to self-interest, an element of ethics, of affection not wholly compounded of desire.