e how you will, you pass your life in
eternally looking up to this wonderful god, who vouchsafes now and then to
caress you, and even say tender things to you.'

'Is it, Nina, that you have made a study of these things, or is all this
mere imagination?'

'Most innocent young lady! I no more dreamed of these things to apply
to such men as your country furnishes--good, homely, commonplace
creatures--than I should have thought of asking you to adopt French cookery
to feed them. I spoke of such men as one meets in what I may call the real
world: as for the others, if they feel life to be a stage, they are always
going about in slipshod fashion, as if at rehearsal. Men like your brother
and young O'Shea, for instance--tossed here and there by accidents, made
one thing by a chance, and something else by a misfortune. Take my word for
it, the events of life are very vulgar things; the passions and emotions
they evoke, _these_ constitute the high stimulants of existence, they make
the _gross jeu_, which it is so exciting to play.'

'I follow you with some difficulty; but I am rude enough to own I scarcely
regret it.'

'I know, I know all about that sweet innocence that fancies to ignore
anything is to obliterate it; but it's a fool's paradise, after all, Kate.
We are in the world, and we must accept it as it is made for us.'

'I'll not ask, does your theory make you better, but does it make you
happier?'

'If being duped were an element of bliss, I should say certainly not
happier, but I doubt the blissful ignorance of your great moralist. I
incline to believe that the better you play any game--life amongst the
rest--the higher the pleasure it yields. I can afford to marry, without
believing my husband to be a paragon--could _you_ do as much?'

'I should like to know that I preferred him to any one else.'

'So should I, and I would only desire to add "to every one else that asked
me." Tell the truth, Kate dearest, we are here all alone, and can afford
sincerity. How many of us girls marry the man we should like to marry,
and if the game were reversed, and it were to be _we_ who should make the
choice--the slave pick out his master--how many, think you, would be wedded
to their present mates?'

'So long as we can refuse him we do not like, I cannot think our case a
hard one.'

'Neither should I if I could stand fast at three-and-twenty. The dread
of that change of heart and feeling that will come, must come, ten years