So when Miriam Strange elected to marry Conquest, he accepted the settled fact, for the time being, in the spirit in which he would have taken some disastrous manifestation of natural phenomena.  Investigation of the motive of such a step was as little in his line as it would have been in the case of a destructive storm at sea.  To his essentially simple way of viewing life it was something to be lamented, but to be borne as best one was able, while one said as little as one could about it.

And yet, somewhere in the wide, rarely explored regions of his nature there were wonderings, questionings, yearnings protests, cries, that forced themselves to the surface now and then, as the boiling waters within the earth gush out in geyser springs.  It required urgent pressure to impel them forth, but when they came it was with violence.  Such an occasion had been his night on Lake Champlain; such another was the evening when he announced to Miriam his intention of becoming Norrie Ford again.  When these moments came they took him by surprise, even though afterward he was able to recognize the fact that they had been long preparing.

It was in this way, without warning, that his heart had sprung on him the question:  Why should she marry him?  At the minute when Conquest was leaving Miriam, he, Ford, was tramping the streets of New York, watching them grow alive with light, in glaring, imaginative ugliness—­ugliness so dazzling in its audacity and so fanciful in its crude commercialism that it had the power to thrill.  It was perhaps the electric stimulus of sheer light that quickened the pace of his slow mentality from the march of acceptance to the rush of protest, at an instant when he thought he had resigned himself to the facts.

Why should she marry Conquest?  He was shouldering his way through the crowds when the question made itself heard, with a curious illuminating force that suggested its own answer.  He was walking, partly to work off the tension of the strain under which these few days were passing, and partly because he had got the idea that he was being shadowed.  He had no profound objection to that, though he would have preferred to give himself up of his own free will rather than to be arrested.  Perhaps, after all, it was only an accident that had caused him to catch sight of the same two men at different moments through the day, and just now it amused him to put them to the test by leading them a dance.  He had come to the conclusion that he had been mistaken, or that he had outwitted them, when this odd question, irrelevant to anything he had directly in his thoughts, presented itself as though it had been asked by some voice outside him:  Why should she marry him?