Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/282

Rh could consider every woman one met with a view to her possibilities as a wife, it would surely make women much more interesting. It was perhaps because he had never viewed them in this way that they had interested him so little. Looking at Marion Clark in the light of such a hypothetical relation, he found her quite a new person—quite agreeable. He wondered how it would be to live with such buoyancy always in the house—a little wearing perhaps; she had, he thought, a masculine sureness about herself, and he believed he liked better a quality of uncertainty and elusiveness in women. He wondered vaguely what he did most prefer in them. He could not explain Lydia's attraction. Marion Clark was a very good-looking girl—quite as good-looking as Lydia, perhaps; there was really no reason why she should not appeal to him in the same way. Then he strayed off to wonder if a man's susceptibility to certain colors might not determine the sort of person with whom he should fall in love. He doubted if a man whose first wife was very dark could have any intrinsic interest in taking for a second wife a high-colored blonde. It had happened, of course; but probably with some slight insincerity. If one's natural inclinations towards an albino were thwarted, one could surely never develop an equal passion for the most beautiful and intellectual Cuban.

Inquiring into his own tastes, he concluded that fair hair and blue eyes were in general distinctly less attractive to him than brown. Yet though it was an inferior class, he was disposed to place Marion Clark quite at the top of her class. He admitted in her case a warmth of temperament which in most blue-eyed and fair-haired persons was unpleasingly lacking. She had a certain originality and humor, too—qualities which he attributed to the blue-eyed class rather than to the brown. It occurred to him that she might very likely illuminate these subtleties herself in discussion, and he determined some time to put them before her. But she was masculinely sure of