"She is to be congratulated on her beauty. It must be of a rare and powerful kind to strike love at one blow into a heart which I thought was surfeited with this sort of thing."
"Her beauty is rare and powerful too."
"It must be, to achieve such a victory over the experience that had driven you into the cool and calm dominion of intellectual love."
"Can I not occupy both dominions? Must intellect be denied me because I fall in love?" I asked, attributing the sarcastic emphasis of his language to a fear that my marriage would lose him his situation.
"I think not," he answered. "My experience of knowledge is, that it is a jealous god. Surely, Sir, your resolution is abrupt! You have declared your intention only to excite my wonder!"
"On the contrary, I am quite sincere when I tell you that I am head over heels in love with this woman, and that I would marry her to-morrow if I thought she would accept me."
He rose, went to the window, stared out for some moments, and then approached me.
"If I understood you aright, Mr. Thorburn, your object in residing here was to enable you to lay in such a stock of knowledge as would enable you to contest for fame with a good promise of success?"
I nodded.