‘You will have a fine opportunity this evening. Don’t you dine at Minchampstead?’
‘Yes. Do you?’
‘Mr. Jingle dines everywhere, except at home. Will you take me over in your trap?’
‘Done. But whom shall we meet there?’
‘The Lavingtons, and Vieuxbois, and Vaurien, and a parson or two, I suppose. But between Saint Venus and Vieuxbois you may soon learn enough to make you a sadder man, if not a wiser one.’
‘Why not a wiser one? Sadder than now I cannot be; or less wise, God knows.’
The colonel looked at Lancelot with one of those kindly thoughtful smiles, which came over him whenever his better child’s heart could bubble up through the thick crust of worldliness.
‘My young friend, you have been a little too much on the stilts heretofore. Take care that, now you are off them, you don’t lie down and sleep, instead of walking honestly on your legs. Have faith in yourself; pick these men’s brains, and all men’s. You can do it. Say to yourself boldly, as the false prophet in India said to the missionary, “I have fire enough in my stomach to burn up” a dozen stucco and filigree reformers and “assimilate their ashes into the bargain, like one of Liebig’s cabbages.”’
‘How can I have faith in myself, when I am playing traitor to myself every hour in the day? And yet faith in something I must have: in woman, perhaps.’
‘Never!’ said the colonel, energetically. ‘In anything but woman? She must be led, not leader. If you love a woman, make her have faith in you. If you lean on her, you will ruin yourself, and her as well.’