Meantime Polly found near by another suitor who offered her all he was--what little there was of him--one of those man-climbers who must run over the sheltering wall of some woman. Thus there was gratified in Polly her one passion for marrying--that she should possess a pet. Now she possesses one, owns him, can turn him round and round, can turn him inside out, can see all there is of him as she sees her pocket-handkerchief, her breast-pin, her coffee cup, or any little familiar piece of property which she can become more and more attached to as the years go by for the reason that it will never surprise her, never puzzle her, never change except by wearing out. This will be the end of the friendship between Drs. Marigold and Mullen: their wives will see to that. So much the better: scattered impostors do least harm. I have struggled to understand the mystery of her choice as to how she should be married. Surely marriage, in the existence of any one, is the hour when romance buds on the most prosaic stalk. It budded for Polly and she eloped! It was a short troubled flight of her heavy mind without the wings of imagination. She got as far as the nearest City Hall. Instead of a minister she chose to be married by a Justice of the Peace: Ben had been unjust, she would be married by the figure of Justice as a penal ceremony executed over Ben: she mailed him a paper and left him to understand that she had fled from him to Justice and Peace! Polly's poetry! A line in an evening paper lets me know that she and the Doctor have gone for their honeymoon to Ocean Grove. When Polly first came North to live and the first summer came round she decided to spend it at Ocean Grove, with the idea, I think, that she would get a grove and an ocean with one railway ticket, without having to change; she could settle in a grove with an ocean and in an ocean with a grove. What her disappointment was I do not know, but every summer she has gone back to Ocean Grove--the Franklin Flats by the sea.... Yesterday I said good-bye to Ben. I had spent part of every evening with him since Polly's marriage--silent, empty evenings--a quiet, stunned man. Confidence in himself blasted out of him, confidence in human nature, in the world. With no imagination in him to deal with the reasons of Polly's desertion--just a passive acceptance of it as a wall accepts a hole in it made by a cannon ball. Her name was never called. A stunned, silent man. Clear, joyous steady light in his eyes gone--an uncertain look in them. Strangest of all, a reserve in his voice, hesitation. And courtesy for bluff warm confidence--courtesy as of one who stumblingly reflects that he must begin to be careful with everybody.