One evening he found even as he was with her, his attention wavered, dimmed, and fixed itself on a deal he was planning with his grandfather, a small affair which he hoped to put through on the side, but from which, as he was to handle it by himself, he expected quite a brilliant percentage of profit. He answered Martha at random, came back to her world with a guilty start, excusing his lapse by explaining to himself that he was eager for that profit only because it would considerably add to the sum he was laying by for the equipment of the new home. As he sat listening to Martha and agreeing with her, and at the same time speculating about the age and condition of the oak on the tract he hoped to buy, and how much of it was big enough to make quarter-sawing profitable, he thought whimsically that he was as good as married already, that he was doing just what was done by all the husbands he knew. Martha stopped suddenly, as if he had spoken aloud, or as if she had been struck by a new thought, "Neale, do you realize it! We're really going to be married--just like anybody else. I don't believe I ever thought we really would!" "Didn't you?" he said. "I always had a sort of notion we would." But although this was not the first time she had expressed this feeling, something about her accent, or aspect, crystallized into tangible form anticipations which had been as vague in his case as in hers. About this time he began to notice that instead of misty, in-the-distant-future glances at what marriage was to mean, came concrete, definite, recurring pictures of one scene after another in the life before them. His imagination, never very quickly aroused or very flexible by nature, began to be prodded by circumstances into an unwonted activity on the subject of Martha and this marriage. He saw her in his mind's eye across the breakfast table, on the other side of the hearth, or even sitting on the arm of his chair with his arm around her, as she often sat now while they talked over their plans. But (it was one of the first intimations he had of the storm before him) he encountered some curious dumb resistance deep in his heart when he tried to think of her more intimately with the veils of girlhood gone, as his wife. Something within flashed up with chivalric swiftness to shut out such thoughts. He amazed himself once or twice by feeling his face hot, as though with shame at the idea of making Martha, Martha whom he loved so much, his wife. What sort of morbid prudery was this? As soon as it was passed he found it incredible; and felt it again. "Perhaps it wasn't so incredible after all. Maybe that was the price you paid for knowing something about life." It was inevitable--what must be felt by every man who had not been brought up in a vacuum. And it was really all right and nothing to be squeamish over. Human nature is what it is, and there's no use dressing it up in high-sounding names!