"So Dulcimer and I are all right, you see," pursued Tom, without heeding this remark. "We shall be a very happy couple. All the world will have us at their houses, and we shall have all the world at ours. There won't be room left for any thing but happiness; and that'll squeeze in anywhere, you know. It's like chips floating round on the surface of a whirlpool—they fly round and round splendidly—till they get sucked in."
"Tom!" cried his companion. "What has come to you? Your life is not so different now from what it has always been;—and I have always known you for a light-hearted fellow. I can't have you take this tone."
Tom was silent, biting the ends of his moustache in a nervous way, which bespoke a good deal of mental excitement; Philip feared, of mental trouble.
"If a friend may ask, how came you to do what is so unsatisfactory to you?" he said at length.
"My mother and sister! They were so preciously afraid I should ruin myself. Philip, I could not make head against them. They were too much for me, and too many for me; they were all round me; they were ahead of me; I had no chance at all. So I gave up in despair. Women are the overpowering when they take a thing in their head! A man's nowhere. I gave in, and gave up, and came away, and now—they're satisfied."
"Then the affair is definitely concluded?"
"As definitely as if my head was off."
Philip did not laugh, and there was a pause again. The colours were fading from sky and water, and a yellow, soft moonlight began to assert her turn. It was a change of beauty for beauty; but neither of the two young men seemed to take notice of it.
"Tom," began the other after a time, "what you say about the way most of us live, is more or less true; and it ought not to be true."
"Of course it is true!" said Tom.