better?"

"What do you mean?"

"Pardon me, Tom; but you have been frank with me. By your own account,
she will get very little."

"All she wants. I'll give her a local habitation and a name."

"I am sure you are unjust."

"Not at all. That is all half the girls want; all they try for. She's
very content. O, I'm very good to her when we are together; and I mean
to be. You needn't look at me," said Tom, trying to laugh.
"Three-quarters of all the marriages that are made are on the same
pattern. Why, Phil, what do the men and women of this world live for?
What's the purpose in all I've been doing since I left college? What's
the good of floating round in the world as I have been doing all summer
and winter here this year? and at home it is different only in the
manner of it. People live for nothing, and don't enjoy life. I don't
know at this minute a single man or woman, of our sort, you know, that
enjoys life; except that one. And _she_ isn't our sort. She has no
money, and no society, and no Europe to wander round in! O, they would
_say_ they enjoy life; but their way shows they don't."

"Enjoyment is not the first thing," Philip said thoughtfully.

"O, isn't it! It's what we're all after, anyhow; you'll allow that."

"Perhaps that is the way we miss it."

"So Dulcimer and I are all right, you see," pursued Tom, without
heeding this remark. "We shall be a very happy couple. All the world
will have us at their houses, and we shall have all the world at ours.
There won't be room left for any thing but happiness; and that'll
squeeze in anywhere, you know. It's like chips floating round on the
surface of a whirlpool--they fly round and round splendidly--till they
get sucked in."

"Tom!" cried his companion. "What has come to you? Your life is not so
different now from what it has always been;--and I have always known
you for a light-hearted fellow. I can't have you take this tone."

Tom was silent, biting the ends of his moustache in a nervous way,
which bespoke a good deal of mental excitement; Philip feared, of
mental trouble.

"If a friend may ask, how came you to do what is so unsatisfactory to
you?" he said at length.

"My mother and sister! They were so preciously afraid I should ruin
myself. Philip, I _could not_ make head against them. They were too
much for me, and too many for me; they were all round me; they were
ahead of me; I had no chance at all. So I gave up in despair. Women are
the overpowe