oung man, with considerable expectations. But he
could not think of any other girl.

In February or March, 1839, Mr. Domecq died. The Maisons came to
England, and the marriage was proposed. Adele stayed at Chelmsford until
September, when he wrote the long poem of "Farewell," dated the eve of
their last meeting and parting.

At twenty young men do not die of love; but I find that a fortnight
after writing this he was taken seriously ill. During the winter of
1839-40 the negotiations for the marriage in Paris went on. It took
place in March. They kept the news from him as long as they could, for
he was in the schools next Easter term, and Mr. Brown (his college
tutor) had seemed to hope he would get a First, so his mother wrote to
her husband. In May he was pronounced consumptive, and had to give up
Oxford, and all hope of the distinction for which he had laboured, and
with that any plans that might have been entertained for his distinction
in the Church. And his parents' letters of the period put it beyond a
doubt that this first great calamity of his life was the direct
consequence of that unfortunate matchmaking.

For nearly two years he was dragged about from place to place, and from
doctor to doctor, in search of health. Thanks partly to wise treatment,
more to new faces, and most to a plucky determination to employ himself
usefully with his pen and his pencil, he gradually freed himself from
the spell, and fifty years afterwards could look back upon the story as
a pretty comedy of his youthful days.

CHAPTER VII

"KATA PHUSIN" (1837-1838)

Devoted as she was to her husband, Mrs. Ruskin felt bound to watch over
her son at Oxford. It was his health she was always anxious about;
doctoring was her forte. He had suffered from pleurisy; caught cold
easily; was feared to be weak in the lungs; and nobody but his mother
understood him. So taking Mary Richardson, she went up with him
(January, 1837), and settled in lodgings at Adams' in the High. Her plan
was to make no intrusion on his college life, but to require him to
report himself every day to her. She would not be dull; she could drive
about and see the country, and to that end took her own carriage to
Oxford, the "fly" which had been set up two years before. John had been
rather sarcastic about its genteel appearance. "No one," he said, "would
sit down to draw the form of it." However, she and Mary drove to Oxford,
and reckoned that it would only mean fi