kill? And all for a girl --an English girl--a creature all fair
hair and eyes, with no more intelligence than a sheep! Was it not she
who sent him out to his death in the jungle, that her miserable caprice
for a pair of tiger's ears might be immediately satisfied? If a woman
ever loved me, Paul Griggs,--thank heaven no woman ever did,--would I go
out into bogs and desert places and risk my precious skin to find her a
pair of cat's ears? Not I;--wait a moment, though. If I were in his
place, if Miss Westonhaugh loved _me_--I laughed at the conceit. But
supposing she did. Just for the sake of argument, I would allow it. I
think that I would risk something after all. What a glorious thing it
would be to be loved by a woman, once, wholly and for ever. To meet the
creature I described to him the other night, waiting for me to come into
her life, and to be to her all I could be to the woman I should love.
But she has never come; never will, now; still, there is a sort of rest
to me in thinking of rest. Hearth, home, wife, children; the worn old
staff resting in the corner, never to wander again. What a strange thing
it is that men should have all these, and more, and yet never see that
they have the simple elements of earthly happiness, if they would but
use them. And we, outcasts and wanderers, children of sin and darkness,
in whose hands one commandment seems hardly less fragile than another,
would give anything--had we anything to give--for the happiness of a
home, to call our own. How strange it is that what I said to Isaacs
should be true. "Do not marry unless you must depend on each other for
daily bread, or unless you are rich enough to live apart." Yes, it is
true, in ninetynine cases out of a hundred. But then, I should add a
saving clause, "and unless you are quite sure that you love each other."
Ay, there is the _pons asinorum,_ the bridge whereon young asses and old
fools come to such terrible grief. They are perfectly sure they love
eternally; they will indignantly scorn the suggestions of prudence; love
any other woman? never, while I live, answers the happy and
unsophisticated youth. Be sorry I did it? Do you think I am a schoolboy
in my first passion? demands the aged bridegroom. And so they marry, and
in a year or two the enthusiastic young man runs away with some other
enthusiastic man's wife, and the octogenarian spouse finds himself
constituted into a pot of honey for his wife's swarming relations to
settle