being. We do it all the
time; we do it lightly. Nevertheless, it is a dreadful thing--not one
that ought not to be done, but one that ought to be done only under
imperative compulsion, and then with every precaution. He had interfered
in Dorothy Hallowell's destiny. He had lifted her out of the dim obscure
niche where she was ensconced in comparative contentment. He had lifted
her up where she had seen and felt the pleasures of a life of luxury.

"But for me," he said to himself, "she would now be marrying this poor
young lawyer, or some chap of the same sort, and would be looking
forward to a life of happiness in a little flat or suburban cottage."

If she should refuse his offer--what then? Clearly he ought to do his
best to help her to happiness with the other man. He smiled cynically at
the moral height to which his logic thus pointed the way. Nevertheless,
he did not turn away but surveyed it--and there formed in his mind an
impulse to make an effort to attempt that height, if Fate should rule
against him with her. "If I were a really decent man," thought he, "I'd
sit down now and write her that I would not marry her but would give her
young man a friendly hand in the law if she wished to marry him." But he
knew that such utter generosity was far beyond him. "Only a hero could
do it," said he; he added with what a sentimentalist might have called a
return of his normal cynicism, "only a hero who really in the bottom of
his heart didn't especially want the girl." And a candid person of
experience might possibly admit that there was more truth than cynicism
in his look askance at the grand army of martyrs of renunciation, most
of whom have simply given up something they didn't really want.

"If she accepts me, I'll make it impossible for her not to be happy," he
said to himself, in all the fine unselfishness of passion--not divine
unselfishness but human--not the kind we read about and pretend to
have--and get a savage attack of bruised vanity if we are accused of not
having it--no, but just the kind we have and show in our daily
lives--the unselfishness of longing to make happy those whom it would
make us happier to see happy. "She may think she cares for this young
clerk--" so ran his thoughts--"but she doesn't know her own mind. When
she is mine, I'll take her in hand as a gardener does a delicate rare
flower--and, by Heaven, how I shall make her blossom and bloom!"

It would hardly be possible for a human bein