"You cannot wonder at it!"
I coloured hotly as I answered,—
"I know it seems as if I had been a confounded prig in refusing her last year—people may say so; but if I had given in and kept her with me in Paris, then everybody would have been slanging me for that!"
Dick laughed.
"No, Victor; I am not slanging you for one or the other course. You acted up to your own principle—every fellow must do that; but I am not sure your principle is the best—that perpetual denial to impulse, that refusal to take what you can get in the moment, because of what you may be called upon to pay hereafter. At any rate, it may not be the luckiest nor the happiest. But still, in the case of a man who has many equally strong wishes, it is difficult to say what he should do. In your case the upshot of either resolution would have been the same—as things are, you will get your book out and be discontented; in the other case, you would have married Lucia and been discontented!"
"You may be as cynical as you please," I muttered, with my hands pressed over my eyes. "I am not responsible for the complex nature of the human brain, nor can I simplify it. I know what I am going to do now. Having secured the work, I am going to gain Lucia too, if it is in the power of any man—whether, as you put it, her virtue, or her health, or her inclination, or the whole lot together, have broken down!"
"And if you don't get her, you will get over it: we all do, Vic," he said, with a smile.
"Very possibly," I assented.
It was not worth while to discuss a contingency I had determined to prevent.
"A man's profession is his best friend," Dick went on, stretching himself out on the couch. "That he can command; and for the rest—purchasable pleasures—those he can command. These affaires-de-coeur, which you can't command, are always more bother than they are worth."