Now, perhaps, you see why I was not looking forward with any exuberance of optimism to finding the woman whom I needed and wanted, and who needed and wanted me. Prompted by my experiences and guided somewhat by my shrewd and cynical friend Bob Armitage, I had been giving no small amount of spare time to observing and thinking about the American woman. And while I admired that charming lady and found her an amusing companion for an occasional leisure hour, I saw that she was not to be taken seriously by a serious person. She knew how to look well, how to make a good “front,” how to get perhaps a hundred dollars worth of pleasing surface results by squandering a thousand or two thousand dollars. As an ornament, a decoration, as a basket of rare inedible fruit to irradiate lovely costliness, she could not be beaten. As wife to a showy plutocrat, ignorant of the art of comfortable living, as head mistress to an European noble with servants trained to maintain his state in splendid and orderly discomfort, she would do excellently well. But not for the practical uses of sensible life. She had no training for them, no taste for them, no intention of adapting herself to them, whatever she might pretend in order to catch a bill-payer. Still, I did not despair. I dared not despair. If I had, loneliness--and heartache, yes, heartache--and my sense of present and future futility would have become intolerable. On the other hand, while there was every reason for haste--when happiness was my goal, and life is short and uncertain--I was resolved to be deliberate. If I should be deceived--perhaps by the girl’s honest self-deception--into choosing wrong, how she would hate me! For not again would, or could I let a woman use me as Edna had used me. A fool is a grown-up person who has never grown up. I had grown up--had become a definite person, knowing what I wanted and what I did not want. Such persons are hated by those who try in vain to use them. My one chance lay in finding a woman with the same definite tastes as mine. Only disaster could come through the woman who might marry me, pretending to agree with me and secretly resolved to “redeem” me once she got me firmly in her grasp.