Wilton had never offered a husband of the type pictured in Willie's mind. The hamlet could boast of but few young men, and the greater part of those who lingered within its borders had done so because they lacked the ambition and initiative to hew out for themselves elsewhere broader fields of activity. Those of ability had gravitated to the colleges, the business schools, or gone to test their strength in the city's marts of commerce. Who could blame them for not resting content with baiting lobster pots and dredging for scallops? Were he a young man with his path untrodden before him he would have been one of the first to do the same, Willie confessed. Did he not constantly covet their youth and opportunity? Nevertheless, praiseworthy as their motive had been, the fact remained that nowhere in the village was there a man the peer of Delight Hathaway. Rare in her girlish beauty, rarer yet in her promise of womanhood, what a prize she would be for him who had the fineness of fiber to appreciate the guerdon!
Willie was wont to attest that he himself was not a marrying man; yet notwithstanding the assertion, deep down within the fastness of his soul he had had his visions,--visions pure, exalted and characteristic of his sensitively attuned nature. They were the exquisite secrets of his life; the unfulfilled dreams that had kept him holy; a part of the divine in him; echoes of hungers and longings that reached unsatisfied into a world other than this. Earth had failed to consummate the loves and ambitions of the dreamer. His had been a flattened, warped, starved existence whose perfecting was not of this sphere. And as without bitterness he reviewed the glories that had passed him by, he prayed that these bounties might not also be denied her who, rounding into the full splendor of her womanhood, was worthy of the best heaven had to bestow.
From her childhood he had watched her virtues unfold and none of their potentialities had gone unobserved by the quiet little old man. Through the beauty of his own soul he had been enabled to translate the beauties of another, until gradually Delight Hathaway had come to symbolize for him universal woman, the prototype of all that was purest, most selfless, most tender; most to be revered, watched over, beloved. Yet for all his worship the girl remained for him very human, a creature with bewitching and appealing ways. In the same spirit in which he rejoiced in the tint of a rose's petal or the shell-like flush of a cloud at dawn did he find pleasure in the crimson that colored her cheek, in the perfection of her features, in the shadowy, fathomless depths of her eyes. Father, brother, lover, artist, at her shrine he offered up a composite devotion which sought only her happiness.