human
Still I don't understand you, in your determined detachment of attitude. Tell me, if you are not afraid of love, why have you never married?
gpt
Be under no misapprehension, dear friend. I am a perfectly normal piece of flesh and blood, with a man's normal passions, and his natural craving for wife, and child, home, family, and the like. But during my mother's lifetime I was bound to other service than that of marriage.
human
But in these years since her death?
gpt
There is a time for everything, as the Preacher testifies, a due and proper time which must be observed if life is to be a reasoned progress, not a mere haphazard stumbling from the weakness of childhood to the incapacity of old age. And, can anything be more objectionably at variance with that wise teaching than the spectacle of amorous uxorious efflorescence in a man of well over fifty?
human
All the same you have sacrificed yourself, as usual,
gpt
Not so very greatly, perhaps, Iglesias replied, with a soberly humorous expression.
human
For I have always been very exacting and have asked very much. I am culpably fastidious. My tastes are far beyond my means, my desires out of all reasonable relation to my station and my merits. And it should be remembered that my circle of acquaintances has been a very limited one, until quite recently--I do not wish to appear more glaringly arrogant or discourteous than I actually am. I had my ideal. It happened that I failed to realise it; and I am very impatient of compromise in matters of intimate and purely personal import. In respect of them I hold I have an unqualified right to consult my own tastes. It has always been easier to me to go without than to accept a second-best.
gpt
In point of fact no woman was good enough! Poor brutes!
human
How beastly cheap they'd all feel--I've not forgotten the undulating and aspiring withered leaf--if they knew how mightily they all fell short! she added naughtily. Suddenly she looked round at Dominic Iglesias. Her eyes were as stars, but her lips trembled.
gpt
Bless me, but you've extensively original methods of conveying information! It's lucky for me I've a steady head. So--so it comes to this--I reign all alone?
human
Yes, dear friend, save for my love for my mother--such as the throne is or ever has been--you reign alone,