"Well," said his companion, who had all this time been leisurely pulling
to pieces some wild flowers he had gathered in the course of the
morning's ramble, "what does it all end in? What, at last, but the old
story--love and a marriage?"

"Love often where there is no possibility of marriage," replied Darcy,
starting up altogether from his recumbent posture, and pacing to and fro
under the shadow of the tree. "The full heart, how often does it swell
only to feel the pressure of the iron bond of poverty! This very
sentiment, which our cultivation refines, fosters, makes supreme, is
encountered by that harsh and cruel evil which grows also with the
growth of civilization--poverty--civilized poverty. Oh, 'tis a frightful
thing, this well-born, well-bred poverty! There is a pauper state,
which, loathsome as it is to look upon, yet brings with it a callousness
to endure all inflictions, and a recklessness that can seize with
avidity whatever coarse fragments of pleasure the day or the hour may
afford. But this poverty applies itself to nerves strung for the
subtlest happiness. No torpor here; no moments of rash and unscrupulous
gratification--unreflected on, unrepented of--which being often repeated
make, in the end, a large sum of human life; but the heart incessantly
demands a genuine and enduring happiness, and is incessantly denied. It
is a poverty which even helps to keep alive the susceptibility it
tortures; for the man who has never loved, or been the object of
affection, whose heart has been fed only by an untaught imagination,
feels a passion--feels a regret--it may be far more than commensurate
with that envied reality which life possesses and withholds from him.
No! there is nothing in the circle of human existence more fearful to
contemplate than this perpetual divorce--irrevocable, yet pronounced
anew each instant of our lives--between the soul and its best
affections. And--look you!--this misery passes along the world under the
mask of easy indifference, and wears a smiling face, and submits to be
rallied by the wit, and assumes itself the air of vulgar jocularity. Oh,
this penury that goes well clad, and is warmly housed, and makes a mock
of its own anguish--I'd rather die on the wheel, or be starved to death
in a dungeon!

"My excellent friend!" cried Griffith, startled from his quiescent
posture, and tranquil occupation, by the growing excitement of his
companion, "what has possessed you? Is it the daugh