“It’s a queer case, and, in a way, uncommonly sweet, take it altogether, as these sorts of confusing marital troubles go in these days. For I was privately planning to marry him, so that he could have the house and money that he thought were his own, without creating any fuss with old Grove over the affair. And he was chivalrously going to marry me (in fact did in a way) so as to deliver me and my money out of old Grove’s clutches without disgracing his father. Of course it was all quite as if the question of managing the money were the one question on earth to be considered. Isn’t it disgraceful? Think of the confusion that comes of unintelligent conduct, in regard to what real love and real marriage is. In a way, Reg is a lovable fellow, and has some common sense in him. He is my own cousin, anyway, and I would do anything to save him except to marry him, and luckily he don’t want me to do that; so I can mother him still, as I have always done. I promised his mother I would do my best for him; and I find he had promised to do the same by me. And I think we have both blunderingly tried.” “Oh, he’ll be well mothered among them all,” said Robert, when Daniel one day told him all this. “And the queer part is, it is my opinion that Mrs. Mancredo loves him with the soundest kind of a real wife love, whether she knows it or not. But as for him, he says he has never had a permanent attraction toward any woman except the mother of his child. And now she dreads him with a furious fear, lest he should somehow set up a claim, and get power over her boy. I’ve seen women like that before. I wonder where these transitional states will land us all.” “It is the great question of the day,” said Daniel. “But manœuvres on the part of men to disguise from women the conditions of this crucial epoch will not help the cause along. Men must come into recognition of the fact that perfect frankness between men and women will lead up to a natural settlement of the matter as nothing else will do. In fact, it depends altogether upon the courageous doings of the dualized.” “Just what do you mean by dualized?” said Robert. “I mean first, as Bacon says, the men and women ‘who have procured the will to obey the reason, not to invade it.’” “He called that the moralization of the whole being; you call it the dualization. But you include something else,” said Robert, “in your last meaning.” “Oh, that last point comes later. And no person is ready even to discuss that, until first the subjection of the will to the reason is accomplished by them and in them. That includes the real moralization of the whole being, body and spirit,” said Daniel.