ed the rich,
elderly, stout, and gouty bridegroom whom the lady had captured. There
he was before my panic-stricken eyes! The wedding was exactly as I had
already described it. It took place in London, just as I had said. The
remembrance that the book had passed beyond my own control, the
irrevocability of certain ghastly sentences, came over me in a flash,
together with the certainty that, however earnestly I might deny, swear,
take solemn oaths on family Bibles, nothing, nothing, not even a voice
from heaven, much less that of a rural dean still on earth, could make
my innocence credible.

I may add that no voice from heaven sounded, and that I never made any
attempt at self-exculpation, or invited my father to sacrifice himself a
second time.

As I heard "The Voice that breathed o'er Eden" and saw the bride of
twenty-five advance up the aisle to meet the bridegroom of forty-five
awaiting her deeply flushed, in a distorted white waistcoat--I had
mercilessly alluded to his white waistcoat as an error of judgment--I
gave myself up for lost; _and I was lost_.

But all this time, while I have been giving a free rein to my
autobiographic instincts, the question still remains unanswered, Why is
human nature so prone to think it has been travestied that it becomes
impervious to reason on the subject the moment the idea has entered the
mind? Once lodged, I have never known such an idea dislodged, however
fantastic. Why is it that if, like Mrs. Clifford, one has the good
fortune to evolve a type, no one can believe it is not an individual?
Why does not the outraged friend console himself with the remembrance
that if he is one of many others who are feeling equally harrowed, he
cannot really be the object of a malignant spite, carefully disguised
till then under the apparel of a cheerful friendship?

I think an answer--a partial answer--to the latter question may be found
in the fact that balm was never yet poured on a wounded spirit by the
assurance that there are thousands of others exactly like itself. We can
all endure to be lampooned. (I have even known a man who was deeply
disappointed when he was forced to believe that he had not been
victimised.) But to be told we are one of a herd! This flesh and blood
cannot tolerate. It is unthinkable; a living death. That we who "look
before and after," and "whose sincerest laughter with some pain is
fraught"; that _we_, lonely, superb, pining for what is not,
misunderstood by