uld I hear of any marriage--after what you have
said, I shall certainly think it my duty to interfere."

When Dick came out the day seemed to have grown dark to him; the sky was
all covered with threads of black; he could scarcely see his way.

CHAPTER XL.

Nevertheless Dick went down to Highcombe on the following Saturday.
There are two ways in which advice can work: one by convincing the man
who receives it to abandon his own evil way, and adopt the good way set
before him, which of course is the object of all good advice, although
but rarely attained to; the other is to make him far more hotly and
determinedly bent upon his own way, with a sort of personal opposition
to the adviser, and angry sense that he has not properly understood the
subject, or entered into those subtle reasons below the surface which
make a certain course of action, not generally desirable, perhaps, the
only one that can be appropriately adopted in this particular case. This
was the effect produced upon Dick. He spent the intervening time in
turning it over and over in his mind, as he had already done so often,
until all the outlines were blurred. For a long time he had been able to
put that early, fatal, mad marriage out of his mind altogether, finding
himself actually able to forget it; so that if any one had suddenly
accused him of being, as his old friend said, a married man, he would
have, on the first shock, indignantly denied the imputation. It had
lasted so short a time, it had ended in such miserable disaster! Scarcely
a week had passed before he had discovered the horror and folly of what
he had done. He had not, like many men, laid the blame upon the unhappy
creature who had led him into these toils. She was no unhappy creature,
but one of those butterfly-women without any soul, to whom there are no
distinctions of right and wrong. He discovered afterwards that if he had
not himself been honourable, it was not she who would have insisted upon
the bond of marriage, and whether she had ever intended to be bound by
it he could not tell. Her easy, artless independence of all moral laws
had been a revelation to the young man such as arrested his very life,
and filled him with almost awe in the midst of his misery, disgust, and
horror. Without any soul, or heart, or shame, or sense that better was
required from her--this was what she was. All the evil elements of
corrupt civilisation and savage freedom seemed to have got mixed in