"Don't you? But then you're young and I'm rather old." "I don't think of you as old. I always think of you as some one very good and sometimes you make me laugh." "Oh! Matilda, often, very often, you make me want to cry. And men don't cry." A little scornfully Matilda answered: "_Don't_ they!" Through his mournfulness he felt a glow of happiness, a little aching in his heart, a sort of longing and a pleasant pride in this excursion with a young woman clinging to his arm and treating him with sweet consideration and tenderness. "After all," he thought, "it is certainly true that when they reach middle age men do require an interest in some young life." So, having fished out a theory, as he thought, to meet the case, he was quite content and prepared, untroubled, to enjoy his happiness. He did thoroughly enjoy his happiness. His newly awakened but unpracticed imagination worked like that of a sentimental and self-cloistered writer who, having no conception of human relationships, binds labels about the necks of his personages-- Innocent Girlhood, Middle-aged Bachelorhood, Mother's Love, Manly Honor, English Gentleman--and amuses himself and his readers with propping them up in the attitudes meet and right to their affixed characters. Except that he did not drag the Deity into it, Old Mole lived perfectly for a short space of time in a neatly rounded novelette, with himself as the touching, lamb-like hero and Matilda as the radiant heroine. He basked in it, and when on her he let loose a flood of what he thought to be emotion she only said: "Oh! Go on!" True to his sentimentality he was entirely unconscious of, absolutely unconcerned with, what she might be feeling. He only knew that he had been battered and bewildered and miserable and that now he was comfortable and at his ease. The appointed end of all such things, in print and out of it, is marriage. Outside marriage there is no such thing as affection between man and woman (in that atmosphere passion and desire do not exist and children are not born but just crop up). True to his fiction--and how many men are ever true to anything else?--Old Mole came in less than a week to the idea of marriage with Matilda. It was offensive to his common sense, so repugnant indeed that it almost shocked him back into the world of fact and that hideous mental and spiritual flux from which he was congratulating himself on having escaped. He held his nose and gulped it down and sighed: "Ah! Let us not look on the dark side of life!" Then he asked himself: "Do I love her? She has young dreams of love. How can I give her my love and not shatter them?"