station--to live a life of petty economies, and be
the daily associate of a snob!'

'What the fellow may become at the end of the race--what place he may win
after years of toil and jobbery, I neither know nor care! _She_ will be an
old woman by that time, and will have had space enough in the interval to
mourn over her rejection of me. I shall be a Minister, not impossibly at
some court of the Continent; Atlee, to say the best, an Under-Secretary
of State for something, or a Poor-Law or Education Chief. There will be
just enough of disparity in our stations to fill her woman's heart with
bitterness--the bitterness of having backed the wrong man!

'The unavailing regrets that beset us for not having taken the left-hand
road in life instead of the right are our chief mental resources after
forty, and they tell me that we men only know half the poignancy of these
miserable recollections. Women have a special adaptiveness for this kind of
torture--would seem actually to revel in it.'

He turned once more to his desk, and to the letter. Somehow he could make
nothing of it. All the dangers that he desired to avoid so cramped his
ingenuity that he could say little beyond platitudes; and he thought with
terror of her who was to read them. The scornful contempt with which _she_
would treat such a letter was all before him, and he snatched up the paper
and tore it in pieces.

'It must not be done by writing,' cried he at last. 'Who is to guess for
which of the fifty moods of such a woman a man's letter is to be composed?
What you could say _now_ you dared not have written half an hour ago. What
would have gone far to gain her love yesterday, to-day will show you the
door! It is only by consummate address and skill she can be approached at
all, and without her look and bearing, the inflections of her voice, her
gestures, her "pose," to guide you, it would be utter rashness to risk her
humour.'

He suddenly bethought him at this moment that he had many things to do
in Ireland ere he left England. He had tradesmen's bills to settle, and
'traps' to be got rid of. 'Traps' included furniture, and books, and
horses, and horse-gear: details which at first he had hoped his friend
Lockwood would have taken off his hands; but Lockwood had only written him
word that a Jew broker from Liverpool would give him forty pounds for his
house effects, and as for 'the screws,' there was nothing but an auction.

Most of us have known at some per