He was in a double dilemma. If he had to choose between Miss Tancred and Mrs. Fazakerly his choice would never be made. On the other hand, if he decided for both, his comfort would be more insecure than ever. There would be jealousy to a dead certainty; in all mixed households that was where the shoe pinched. To pursue that vulgar figure, the Colonel's daughter was like a pair of old and easy shoes made by a good maker, a maker on whom he could rely; a wife would be like new boots ordered rashly from an unknown firm. They would be his best pair, no doubt, but your best pair is generally the tightest. He had some trying years before him; and well, a man does not put on new boots for a long uphill scramble. So the Colonel's breast was torn with internecine warfare, desire battling with habit, and habit with desire. No wonder if in that awful struggle the fate of one insignificant individual counted for nothing. Frida Tancred never had counted. Durant admitted that his imagination was apt to work in somewhat violent colors, and that there might be a point of view from which the Colonel would tone down into a very harmless and even pathetic figure; for Mrs. Fazakerly he had no terrors. But there was the girl. It was hard to say exactly what he had done to her. Apparently he had taken her soul while it was young and squeezable, and had crushed it till it fitted into all his little habits; he had silenced her heart with commonplaces, and dulled her intellect with his incomprehensible fatuity. And through it all he had been the most innocent little gentleman alive. Oh, yes, he was pathetic enough in his way. He himself was only an instrument in the hands of irrepressible Nature who couples wild soul with tame, hot blood with cold blood, genius with folly, and makes her sport of their unhappy offspring. And Nature was playing a glorious game with Frida Tancred now. That was Durant's second idea; the thought that had struck him so unpleasantly after his last interview with her. To put it coarsely, he had a suspicion, a fear, that Miss Tancred was beginning to fall in love with him. He might have known that it would happen. It was just the sort of damnable irony most likely to pursue that unfortunate woman. There could be no mistake about it; he knew it; he knew it by many subtle and infallible signs. Somewhere he had heard or read that no nice man ever knows these things. That was all nonsense; or, if it had any meaning at all, it could only mean that no nice man ever shows that he knows. The fact remained that if he had loved her he would not have known.