Perhaps if his mental grasp as to moral relations had been as bewildered as it was when, five years before, he regularly turned to his “drinks” in order to quiet his perplexities, he would have accepted the congratulations and slipped along the lines as publicly expected of him. But five years’ immersion in the blithesome delights of a world where righteousness reigned, had fortified Reginald in his inherent love of truth and straightforward dealing, and had enabled him to adopt as theories to be immediately practicalized, the methods of honor (founded on simplicity and courage) toward which the Dakshas aspired. So when a few days later he found Alitza had legally passed over to him a good little fortune, and had taken steps to secure (on some of the many available pleas) a legal release from the results of that marriage-ceremony, he said, cheerfully and blithely: “That’s all right.” And when he further learned that Alitza had deeded a further amount of wealth to Bertha Gemacht, he said: “That’s all wrong; I won’t allow it. I hope to marry her, and so right up things. And the other money is enough for both of us,” showing that, as Alitza said to herself, “five years, even in the society of angels, could not rid the Grove blood of the thought that a man can cast off a woman when he chooses, and then marry her when he gets ready; but that, having married her, such a man felt it was better for him that she should possess as little of that legal tender called money, as possible; seeing (to the Grove notion of things) it was sum and substance of independence. She told Ethel that the irrepressible young hoodlum stood confessed at this touchstone, as far as his relations to what he would have called ‘this sort of a woman’ were concerned. Then she said to Grove: “It seems difficult for you to understand that you have nothing to do with what money someone else may choose to give to a third person, let that third person be whom it may.” For quarrel these two people must, by nature. And glad Alitza was that she had always kept him beyond arm’s length, and now had not let her sympathy with his sickness, or her joy at his recovery, cause her to abbreviate the distance between their ineradicable antagonisms. “This is a different case,” said he. “All cases are alike here, for all are individuals,” said she. “But—she—she’s to be my wife.” “That’s what you don’t yet know,” said Alitza. “Pah, it takes more than a visit to paradise to take that sort of stuff out of your brains. I see the use of purgatory now. You ought to have gone there and staid longer. We’ve all agreed to let you drop, the next time you knock yourself to pieces. So look out!” “All right, then, I won’t take your money,” said he. “Well, leave it; or you can put it into the sinking fund for the enterprise of this family,” she said. “No one is overinfluenced here.” And he did it that day. And then the divorce was amicably enough accomplished, but the other marriage did not occur.