"You must bring your husband to see me in Paris some time next year.
By the bye, you don't think he will disapprove of me?"
"Do you imagine Mr. Jacks----"
"What were you going to say?"
Irene had stopped as if for want of the right word She was
reflecting.
"It never struck me," she said, "that he would wish to regulate my
choice of friends. Yet I suppose it would be within his right?"
"Conventionally speaking, undoubtedly."
"Don't think I am in uncertainty about this particular instance,"
said Irene. "No, he has already told me that he liked you. But of
the general question, I had never thought."
"My dear, who does, or can, think before marriage of all that it
involves? After all, the pleasures of life consist so largely in the
unexpected."
Irene paced a few yards in silence, and when she spoke again it was
of quite another subject.
Whether this sojourn with her experienced and philosophical friend
made her better able to face the meeting with Arnold Jacks was not
quite certain. At moments she fancied so; she saw her position as
wholly reasonable, void of anxiety; she was about to marry the man
she liked and respected--safest of all forms of marriage. But
there came troublesome moods of misgiving. It did not flatter her
self-esteem to think of herself as excluded from the number of those
who are capable of love; even in Helen Borisoff's view, the elect,
the fortunate.
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