"I hope so, for your own sake. You are abandoning a fine future."
"Why do you say that? My future is still mine. I have not abandoned it. I have still my schemes and my hopes. I shall try to realise them."
"You will never realise them, Sir, if you allow your mind to be diverted by the first small attraction that happens to rise.
"Small attraction! But I can forgive you. You are a scholar, a student, a recluse—what should you know of love?"
His eyes shone.
"Nothing! nothing! I am ignorant of the passion," he exclaimed, flourishing his hand.
"Yet I should have taken you to be too wise a man to have neglected cultivating your sympathies in the direction where the most provocation lies. Love is so human a passion, its consequences are so manifold, its influences so remarkable, that were you anything of a philosopher you would have made it a study. How can you hope to understand men, when you are ignorant of the great master-passion of humanity?"
"How do you know I am so ignorant as you think me?"
"I judge so by the sneers you are disposed to level at love, and by the light contemptuous manner with which you treat it."