These imperfections gave him something to forgive in her, something to indulge, to throw the great golden mantle of Love over, and--no, not to forget. The flaws were the last thing he wanted to forget; but if there had been any chance for him of getting free of Marjory’s fetters, that last chance had floated away, when she sent him upon this unpalatable quest. It seemed to him needless, it was unpleasant; and yet how it bound him with chains, which he could not and did not wish to break! Men do not like to feel themselves inferior to a woman; but there are kinds of inferiority which a man in love may put up with--and to Fanshawe it seemed that Marjory would be to him what the soul is to the body, what inspiration is to the soul. This was how he put it, saving his own pride. It was not that she would do anything for him, but that she would stimulate him into doing; she would inspire him, he felt; she would bring all his buds of meaning into flower, and work within him a realization of those intentions which arose so often in his mind, and came to nothing when they rose. Through all his journeys he kept thinking of her in this strain. She would be his inspiration. He could do something--something vague, he did not know what--but something worth doing, under the impulse which she would give him. What would she say? Would it be possible for her to accept a rôle in life which was so little encouraging as that of trying to put energy into him? Fanshawe did not ask himself this question--neither did he ask many more, which it would have been very well worth his while to ask. How, if she married him, they were to live; what he could do to make their marriage possible; where and how they were to establish themselves? these questions did not enter his mind--partly, perhaps, because he was still in the reverential stage of love, thinking of her vaguely as something better than all created things, yet impetuously too, as of something which could not be done without, which was necessary to existence. But perhaps it was, on the whole, because of his prevailing character of good-for-nothing that he was able to elude all the practical questions, and to let his love absorb him without any notion of how he could make the after-life possible. Besides, he said to himself, if ever the question crossed his mind, he could do nothing at this moment; she herself had made it impossible for him to do anything. Had she not sent him away from all the uses of life, from all the efforts which he might have been making towards something better--on this wild goose chase--for her? This afforded him an answer to every objection of his own thoughts, and with a certain humorous sense of the cleverness of such a response to all criticism, he used it in imagination even to herself. “What could I do? how could I do anything? You sent me away from rationality to hunt for a needle in a bottle of hay.” This was the imaginary reply which he made to her imaginary fault-finding.