And then—yes, then there had been Utterbourne, holding up before him a glass in which stretched a perspective of strange new combinations.
“I’d begun to feel so uncertain,” he said, with the first shade of weariness in his voice. “When I got out at sea, on my way to some little port, I began to wonder if what I really wanted wasn’t to settle down somewhere and get a few years of domestic life before my time came to die. I guess something of that sort must have been what I wanted all along, even if I never seemed to know what it was.... I thought I’d like to go back to selling shoes again, maybe, and try to get married, if I could, to somebody who’d know how to make a snug little home. I went on planning and planning—always planning.” A faint note of bitterness seemed creeping in. “When I came home from work, I figured, there would be a smiling little wife waiting to welcome me with a kiss and supper. I even figured on a Morris chair and slippers to put on in the evening, instead of—well, I’ve told you the sort of life I’d always been used to.... And I could still go on reading guide books and illustrated pamphlets. But of course,” he ended with a sigh which grew a little sombre before he relinquished it, “I couldn’t very well turn down an offer like Captain Utterbourne’s....”
“Go on,” the girl said. She had heard so much. She knew she could hear what remained without flinching.
“You can imagine the rest,” he said, his tone growing restless. “Most of it you know already.” He told her, not without an increasing though always muffled, groping bitterness, as the exaltation gradually failed, how his romantic soul revived. Caesar was himself again. But that queer little waif of simplicity, almost like homesickness, in his heart, didn’t quite die of despair, even now. “It was about then,” he ended, “that I met you, Stella.”
She had uttered her cry for romance just as Fairy Fate happened to be passing by her door. Fairy Fate decided to have a little fun. Stella wanted a prince. Very well, then, she should have a prince. However, it was really to the waif in his heart that she belonged, though she did not know this at first, and afterward would not have it so, but must ever strive to persuade herself that he had fallen in love with her as he might fall in love with Irmengarde....