im at home, perhaps poorly, whilst she was enjoying
herself in some crowded assembly, surrounded by a troop of young
gallants, encouraging their attentions and making game of the poor old
fool she had cajoled into marrying her. I imagined her pretty, witty,
vivacious and with a temper. A thorough incapacity for the management of
a household, vain, extravagant, frivolous, heartless, calculating.

Such was the mental picture I had drawn of my young aunt. How I could
imagine her of an evening--if she ever stayed at home with her husband
in the evening--yawning over the admiral's long nautical stories,
sighing and pouting when he asked her to bring him his slippers, or
rather his slipper, for he had but one. Turning up her nose as she mixed
his grog for him or lighted his pipe. Shuddering when the old man
caressingly touched her dimpled chin, and pleading fatigue that she
might go to bed early to be alone and dream of some handsome young
lieutenant she had met at Mrs. So-and-So's ball.

"Well, well," said I to myself, "I will not triumph too long over your
fall, uncle, lest some day the like may happen to myself, which Heaven
forfend."

I tried to imagine myself with a wife like my aunt. I, a scholar, a
searcher after the philosopher's stone, with a gay young wife always out
at parties, a family of neglected children at home, breaking in upon my
studies and smashing my crucibles and retorts, tearing up my valuable
MSS, turning my laboratory into a nursery, and profaning my hours of
study with their crying and squabbling.

"No," said I, "it shall not be. I will live single. A scientific man is
wedded to science."

After the letter I had received from my friend Langton, the opinion I
had formed of womankind was somewhat of the lowest. I imagined that all
women were alike, and the dread I felt lest I should fall into a trap
myself, induced me to shut myself up more than ever. I built a
laboratory and fitted it up. I pored over my books, fasted, slept
little, and sought as much as possible to reduce matter into mind. I
resolved to give myself wholly up to the study of the transmutation of
metals, nothing doubting that some day if I persisted in my labours I
should be rewarded by the discovery of the philosopher's stone. I paid
no visits, neither received any. I had seen enough of dissipation, and
was now resolved to make up for lost time. A sudden change had come over
me. I was no longer the "flotter bursch" that the year