Then, too, he was scarcely self-centred and egotistical enough for genuine air-castles of any kind.

To build an air-castle, one's own personality must be the central prop and pillar, for even anything as unsubstantial as an air-castle has its building law.

One must rear around something, or the structure can never rise above the horizon of the future.
Anderson had stored his mind with the poetic facts of the world rather than projected his poetic fancies into the facts of the world.
He saw things largely as they were, with no inflorescence of rainbows where there was none; but there are actual rainbows, and even auroras, so that the man who does not dream has compensations and a less chance of disillusion.

Of course Anderson had thought of marriage; he could scarcely have done otherwise; but he had thought of it as an abstract condition pertaining to himself only in a general way as it pertains to all mankind.

He had never seen himself plainly enough in his fancy as a lover and husband to have a pang of regret or longing.