“At first, Vivian, you limited your aspirations to kid gloves and a cabriolet: it has brought the kid gloves already; by and by it will bring the cabriolet!”
“Our wishes grow by what they feed on. You live in the great world, you can have excitement if you please it; I want excitement, I want the world, I want room for my mind, man! Do you understand me?”
“Perfectly, and sympathize with you, my poor Vivian; but it will all come. Patience! as I preached to you while dawn rose so comfortless over the streets of London. You are not losing time. Fill your mind; read, study, fit yourself for ambition. Why wish to fly till you have got your wings? Live in books now; after all, they are splendid palaces, and open to us all, rich and poor.”
“Books, books! Ah! you are the son of a book-man. It is not by books that men get on in the world, and enjoy life in the mean while.”
“I don’t know that; but, my good fellow, you want to do both,—get on in the world as fast as labor can, and enjoy life as pleasantly as indolence may. You want to live like the butterfly, and yet have all the honey of the bee; and, what is the very deuce of the whole, even as the butterfly, you ask every flower to grow up in a moment; and, as a bee, the whole hive must be stored in a quarter of an hour! Patience, patience, patience!”
Vivian sighed a fierce sigh. “I suppose,” said he, after an unquiet pause, “that the vagrant and the outlaw are strong in me, for I long to run back to my old existence, which was all action, and therefore allowed no thought.”
While he thus said, we had wandered round the Colonnade, and were in that narrow passage in which is situated the more private entrance to the opera: close by the doors of that entrance, two or three young men were lounging. As Vivian ceased, the voice of one of these loungers came laughingly to our ears.
“Oh!” it said, apparently in answer to some question, “I have a much quicker way to fortune than that: I mean to marry an heiress!”
Vivian started, and looked at the speaker. He was a very good-looking fellow. Vivian continued to look at him, and deliberately, from head to foot; he then turned away with a satisfied and thoughtful smile.
“Certainly,” said I, gravely (construing the smile), “you are right there: you are even better-looking than that heiress-hunter!”