He wondered what secret mighty purpose
might be in their lives, and read a newspaper report of an engagement or a
marriage with a little jump of the heart. He looked at the girls and the
women at work over the typewriting machines in the office, with
questioning eyes, asking himself why they did not seek marriage openly and
determinedly, and saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material,
as a machine for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in
the great workshop of the universe. "Marriage is a port, a beginning, a
point of departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage
of life," he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. "All that
goes before is but a preparation, a building. The pains and the triumphs
of all unmarried people are but the good oak planks being driven into
place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage." Or, again, one night
when they were in a rowboat on the lagoon in the park and all about them
in the darkness was the plash of oars in the water, the screams of excited
girls, and the sound of voices calling, he let the boat float in against
the shores of a little island and crept along the boat to kneel, with his
head in her lap and whisper, "It is not the love of a woman that grips me,
Sue, but the love of life.
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