But Alan Merrick, though an excellent fellow in his way, and of
noble fibre, was not quite one of the first, the picked souls of
humanity. He did not count among the finger-posts who point the
way that mankind will travel. Though Herminia always thought him
so. That was her true woman's gift of the highest idealizing
power. Indeed, it adds, to my mind, to the tragedy of Herminia
Barton's life that the man for whom she risked and lost everything
was never quite worthy of her; and that Herminia to the end not
once suspected it. Alan was over thirty, and was still "looking
about him." That alone, you will admit, is a sufficiently grave
condemnation. That a man should have arrived at the ripe age of
thirty and not yet have lighted upon the elect lady--the woman
without whose companionship life would be to him unendurable is in
itself a strong proof of much underlying selfishness, or, what
comes to the same thing, of a calculating disposition. The right
sort of man doesn't argue with himself at all on these matters. He
doesn't say with selfish coldness, "I can't afford a wife;" or, "If
I marry now, I shall ruin my prospects." He feels and acts. He
mates, like the birds, because he can't help himself. A woman
crosses his path who is to him indispensable, a part of himself,
the needful complement of his own personality; and without heed or
hesitation he takes her to himself, lawfully or unlawfully, because
he has need of her. That is how nature has made us; that is how
every man worthy of the name of man has always felt, and thought,
and acted. The worst of all possible and conceivable checks upon
population is the vile one which Malthus glossed over as "the
prudential," and which consists in substituting prostitution for
marriage through the spring-tide of one's manhood.
Alan Merrick, however, was over thirty and still unmarried. More
than that, he was heart-free,--a very evil record. And, like most
other unmarried men of thirty, he was a trifle fastidious. He was
"looking about him." That means to say, he was waiting to find
some woman who suited him. No man does so at twenty. He sees and
loves. But Alan Merrick, having let slip the golden moment when
nature prompts every growing youth to fling himself with pure
devotion at the feet of the first good angel who happens to cross
his path and attract his worship, had now outlived the early flush
of pure passion, and was thinking only of "comfortably settling
himself." In one word, when a man is young, he asks himself with a
thrill what he can do to make happy this sweet soul he loves; when
he has let that critical moment flow by him unseized, he asks only,
in cold blood, what woman will most agreeably make life run smooth
for him. The first stage is pure love; the second, pure
selfishness.