Make your game, gentlemen, make your game, it is all a matter of business! The world must not stand still, even though hearts be broken.
Make your game! The game is made, and here is the result: a great intellect mated to a fool, a fond woman mismatched with a weak, or brutal, or unloving husband!
What, complaining? You played for happiness and you have lost. There are other gamblers coming forward—pray stand aside.
Or it is a lottery, and the people come up to draw. Only a doll, only an idiot, a shrew, a tyrant, a faithless husband, a coquettish wife, a plausible pretender: a woman all paint and padding, all affectation and extravagance,—a man polished enough in his manners, yet coarse and repulsive in the ordinary course of every-day domestic life!
And you grumble? Pray, Sir, and Madam, did you not pay your money and take your chance? Have you not drawn something out of the matrimonial lottery? It does not suit you? Oh! we can have no exchanges here! there are your goods, take them. “Here’s a lottery in which no man draws a blank!” and so forth till the end of time; so forth, while the men and the women go home with their purchases, and shrine them or curse them, according as the goods suit or their tempers incline.
What a game of cross-purposes! what a lottery of incongruous chances! What a singular thing that Arthur and Heather should ever have married! What a still more marvellous affair, that only after the years, the possibility should occur to him of her affection weakening, of her love decaying!
What an awful mistake it is men and women alike make, when they imagine that because love has been, love will be, always!
As though there were any human attachment which constant dropping could not wear away; as though the devotion existed which neglect and distrust, unkindness and coldness, would not ultimately alienate!
Can the tendrils go on for ever feeling after a support which is removed from them? Will there not come a day when they will either wither away, or otherwise turn elsewhere for something around which to twine? Was that what Miss Hope meant? or did she only intend to imply that one day, when he wanted the love, and the help, and the companionship he now spurned, he should stretch forth his hands in vain to meet only vacancy?
Strange things often ride beside a man, keep his company in the night watches, walk with him along the familiar paths; strange things the ghosts of “what has been,” the shadows of “what is to be;” and it was most probably a mixture of both these phantoms that caused Squire Dudley to spur his horse, shying in the moonlight—on—and to push forward more rapidly under the elms and the beeches, beside the hedgerows, bare of flower and leaf, across the gleaming brook—home.