prudential," and which consists in substituting prostitution for
marriage through the spring-tide of one's manhood.

Alan Merrick, however, was over thirty and still unmarried. More
than that, he was heart-free,--a very evil record. And, like most
other unmarried men of thirty, he was a trifle fastidious. He was
"looking about him." That means to say, he was waiting to find
some woman who suited him. No man does so at twenty. He sees and
loves. But Alan Merrick, having let slip the golden moment when
nature prompts every growing youth to fling himself with pure
devotion at the feet of the first good angel who happens to cross
his path and attract his worship, had now outlived the early flush
of pure passion, and was thinking only of "comfortably settling
himself." In one word, when a man is young, he asks himself with a
thrill what he can do to make happy this sweet soul he loves; when
he has let that critical moment flow by him unseized, he asks only,
in cold blood, what woman will most agreeably make life run smooth
for him. The first stage is pure love; the second, pure
selfishness.

Still, Alan Merrick was now "getting on in his profession," and, as
people said, it was high time he should be settled. They said it
as they might have said it was high time he should take a business
partner. From that lowest depth of emotional disgrace Herminia
Barton was to preserve him. It was her task in life, though she
knew it not, to save Alan Merrick's soul. And nobly she saved it.

Alan, "looking about him," with some fine qualities of nature
underlying in the background that mean social philosophy of the
class from which he sprang, fell frankly in love almost at first