"Me dear," replied the O'Kelly, "ye don't know how attractive ye are or ye wouldn't blame me."
I laughed. "Why don't you be firm," I suggested to the Signora, "send him packing about his business?"
"I ought to," admitted the Signora. "I always mean to, until I see him. Then I don't seem able to say anything--not anything I ought to."
"Ye do say it," contradicted the O'Kelly. "Ye're an angel, only I won't listen to ye."
"I don't say it as if I meant it," persisted the Signora. "It's evident I don't."
"I still think it a pity," I said, "someone does not explain to Mrs.
O'Kelly that a divorce would be the truer kindness."
"It is difficult to decide," argued the Signora. "If ever you should want to leave me--"
"Me darling!" exclaimed the O'Kelly.
"But you may," insisted the Signora. "Something may happen to help you, to show you how wicked it all is. I shall be glad then to think that you will go back to her. Because she is a good woman, Willie, you know she is."
"She's a saint," agreed Willie.
At the Obelisk I shook hands with them, and alone pursued my way towards Fleet Street.
The next friend whose acquaintance I renewed was Dan. He occupied chambers in the Temple, and one evening a week or two after the 'Ortensia marriage, I called upon him. Nothing in his manner of greeting me suggested the necessity of explanation. Dan never demanded anything of his friends beyond their need of him. Shaking hands with me, he pushed me down into the easy-chair, and standing with his back to the fire, filled and lighted his pipe.
"I left you alone," he said. "You had to go through it, your slough of despond. It lies across every path--that leads to anywhere. Clear of it?"
"I think so," I replied, smiling.
"You are on the high road," he continued. "You have only to walk steadily. Sure you have left nothing behind you--in the slough?"
"Nothing worth bringing out of it," I said. "Why do you ask so seriously?"
He laid his hand upon my head, rumpling my hair, as in the old days.
"Don't leave him behind you," he said; "the little boy Paul--Paul the dreamer."
I laughed. "Oh, he! He was only in my way."
"Yes, here," answered Dan. "This is not his world. He is of no use to you here; won't help you to bread and cheese--no, nor kisses either. But keep him near you. Later, you will find, perhaps, that all along he has been the real Paul--the living, growing Paul; the other--the active, worldly, pushful Paul, only the stuff that dreams are made of, his fretful life a troubled night rounded by a sleep."
"I have been driving him away," I said. "He is so--so impracticable."
Dan shook his head gravely. "It is not his world," he repeated. "We must eat, drink--be husbands, fathers. He does not understand. Here he is the child. Take care of him."
We sat in silence for a little while--for longer, perhaps, than it seemed to us--Dan in the chair opposite to me, each of us occupied with his own thoughts.
"You have an excellent agent," said Dan; "retain her services as long as you can. She possesses the great advantage of having no conscience, as regards your affairs. Women never have where they--"
He broke off to stir the fire.
"You like her?" I asked. The words sounded feeble. It is only the writer who fits the language to the emotion; the living man more often selects by contrast.
"She is my ideal woman," returned Dan; "true and strong and tender; clear as crystal, pure as dawn. Like her!"
He knocked the ashes from his pipe. "We do not marry our ideals," he went on. "We love with our hearts, not with our souls. The woman I shall marry"--he sat gazing into the fire, a smile upon his face--"she will be some sweet, clinging, childish woman, David Copperfield's Dora. Only I am not Doady, who always seems to me to have been somewhat of a-- He reminds me of you, Paul, a little. Dickens was right; her helplessness, as time went on, would have bored him more and more instead of appealing to him."
"And the women," I suggested, "do they marry their ideals?"
He laughed. "Ask them."
"The difference between men and women," he continued, "is very slight; we exaggerate it for purposes of art. What sort of man do you suppose he is, Norah's ideal? Can't you imagine him?--But I can tell you the type of man she will marry, ay, and love with all her heart."
He looked at me from under his strong brows drawn down, a twinkle in his eye.