"Gramercy! do leave preaching of sermons. I have enow of them from my
Lady my mother. Let's be jolly, if we can."

"You should have the better right to be jolly, to know whither you were
going, and that you should surely come out safe at the far end."

"Happy man be my dole! I'm no wise feared. I'll give an hundred pound
to the Church the week afore I die, and that shall buy me a
soft-cushioned seat in Heaven, I'll warrant."

"Who told you so much? Any that had been there?"

"Man alive! wilt hold thy peace, and let man be? Thou art turned now
into a predicant friar. I'll leave thee here to preach to the
gilly-flowers."

And Matthew walked off, with a sprig of mint in his mouth. He was not a
bad man, as men go. He was simply a man who wanted to please himself,
and to be comfortable and easy. In his eyes the whole fabric of the
universe revolved round Matthew Foljambe. He did not show it as the
royal savage did, who beat a primitive gong in token that, as he had sat
down to dinner, the rest of the world might lawfully satisfy their
hunger; but the sentiment in Matthew's mind was a civilised and refined
form of the same idea. If he were comfortable, what did it signify if
everybody else were uncomfortable?

Like all men in his day--and a good many in our own--Matthew had a low
opinion of woman. It had been instilled into him, as it was at that
time into every man who wrote himself "esquire," that the utmost
chivalrous reverence was due to the ladies as an abstract idea; but this
abstract idea was quite compatible with the rudest behaviour and the
supremest contempt for any given woman in the concrete. Woman was an
article of which there were two qualities: the first-class thing was a
toy, the second was a machine. Both were for the use of man--which was
true enough, had they only realised that it meant for man's real help
and improvement, bodily, mental, and spiritual; but they understood it
to mean for the bodily comfort and mental amusement of the nobler half
of the human race. The natural result of this was that every woman must
be appropriated to some master. The bare notion of allowing a woman to
choose whether she would go through life unattached to a master, or, if
otherwise, to reject one she feared or disliked, would have seemed to
Matthew the most preposterous audacity on the part of the inferior
creature, as it would also have appeared if the inferior creature had
shown discontent with the