no wonder....
He was glad on the whole that his was the part to mold.

Nevertheless, he had his inconsistencies.

Unlike many men of strong will and driving purpose he liked strength of character and pronounced individuality in women; and he, too, had had fleeting visions of what life might have been had Flora Thornton entered life twenty years later.

He had been quite sincere in telling her that the young stranger reminded him of the most powerful personality he had met in California, and he believed that within a reasonable time Helene would be as variously cultivated, as widely, if less erratically developed.

But was there any such insurgent force in her depths?
It was not within the possibilities that at any time in her life Flora Thornton had been pliable.
A man had little time to study his wife in California these days.