So, following his natural bent, he became an electrician, and now, abandoning the practical side of that modest calling, he was an experimental physicist, full of deep but unremunerative lore, and--an unsuccessful inventor.

Certainly he owed something to his family, and if his father wished that he should marry, well, marry he must, as a matter of duty, if for no other reason.

After all, the thing was not pressing; for it it came to the point, what woman was likely to accept him?
All he had done to-night was to settle the general principles in his own mind.

When it became necessary--if ever--he could deal with the details.
And yet this sort of marriage which was proposed to him, was it not an unholy business?
He cared little for women, having no weakness that way, probably because of the energy which other young men gave to the pursuit of them was in his case absorbed by intense and brain-exhausting study.
Therefore he was not a man who if left to himself, would marry, as so many do, merely in order to be married; indeed, the idea to him was almost repulsive.

Had he been a woman-hater, he might have accepted it more easily, for then to him one would have been as the other.