"Yet most men marry, and most men survive the operation."
"If it were only necessary to live, that would be a consolatory and encouraging reflection. But to live with peace, to live with dignity, to live with freedom, to live in harmony with your thoughts, your habits, your aspirations—and this in the perpetual companionship of a person to whom you have given the power to wound your peace, to assail your dignity, to cripple your freedom, to jar on each thought and each habit, and bring you down to the meanest details of earth, when you invite her, poor soul, to soar to the spheres—that makes the To Be or Not To Be, which is the question."
"If I were you, Harley, I would do as I have heard the author of 'Sandford and Merton' did,—choose out a child and educate her yourself, after your own heart."
"You have hit it," answered Harley, seriously. "That has long been my idea,—a very vague one, I confess. But I fear I shall be an old man before I find even the child."
"Ah!" he continued, yet more earnestly, while the whole character of his varying countenance changed again,—"ah, if indeed I could discover what I seek,—one who, with the heart of a child, has the mind of a woman; one who beholds in nature the variety, the charm, the never feverish, ever healthful excitement that others vainly seek in the bastard sentimentalities of a life false with artificial forms; one who can comprehend, as by intuition, the rich poetry with which creation is clothed,—poetry so clear to the child when enraptured with the flower, or when wondering at the star! If on me such exquisite companionship were bestowed—why, then—" He paused, sighed deeply, and, covering his face with his hand, resumed, in faltering accents,—
"But once—but once only, did such vision of the Beautiful made Human rise before me,—rise amidst 'golden exhalations of the dawn.' It beggared my life in vanishing. You know only—you only—how—how—"
He bowed his head, and the tears forced themselves through his clenched fingers.
"So long ago!" said Audley, sharing his friend's emotion. "Years so long and so weary, yet still thus tenacious of a mere boyish memory!"
"Away with it, then!" cried Harley, springing to his feet, and with a laugh of strange merriment. "Your carriage still waits: set me home before you go to the House."
Then laying his hand lightly on his friend's shoulder, he said, "Is it for you, Audley Egerton, to speak sneeringly of boyish memories? What else is it that binds us together? What else warms my heart when I meet you? What else draws your thoughts from blue-books and beer-bills to waste them on a vagrant like me? Shake hands. Oh, friend of my boyhood! recollect the oars that we plied and the bats that we wielded in the old time, or the murmured talk on the moss-grown bank, as we sat together, building in the summer air castles mightier than Windsor. Ah, they are strong ties, those boyish memories believe me! I remember, as if it were yesterday, my translation of that lovely passage in Persius, beginning— let me see—ah!