king a young wife happy. My friend, Dr. Galliot, married his ward, and
he had the best wife of any man of my acquaintance. She has been
publishing his learned manuscripts ever since his death. That is an
extreme case, for he was forty-five years her senior, and stood bald at
the altar. Old General Althorpe married Julia Dahoop, and, but for his
preposterous jealousy of her, might be cited in proof that the ordinary
reckonings are not to be a yoke on the neck of one who earnestly seeks to
spouse a fitting mate, though late in life. But, what are fifty years?
They mark the prime of a healthy man's existence. He has by that time
seen the world, can decide, and settle, and is virtually more
eligible--to use the cant phrase of gossips--than a young man, even for a
young girl. And may not some fair and fresh reward be justly claimed as
the crown of a virtuous career?

I say all this, yet my real feeling is as if I were bald as Dr. Galliot
and jealous as General Althorpe. For, with my thorough knowledge of
myself, I, were I like either one of them, should not have offered myself
to the mercy of a young woman, or of the world. Nor, as I am and know
myself to be, would I offer myself to the mercy of Alice Amble. When my
filleule first drove into Dayton she had some singularly audacious ideas
of her own. Those vivid young feminine perceptions and untamed
imaginations are desperate things to encounter. There is nothing beyond
their reach. Our safety from them lies in the fact that they are always
seeing too much, and imagining too wildly; so that, with a little help
from us, they may be taught to distrust themselves; and when they have
once distrusted themselves, we need not afterwards fear them: their
supernatural vitality has vanished. I fancy my pretty Alice to be in this
state now. She leaves us to-morrow. In the autumn we shall have her with
us again, and Louise will scan her compassionately. I desire that they
should meet. It will be hardly fair to the English girl, but, if I stand
in the gap between them, I shall summon up no small quantity of dormant
compatriotic feeling. The contemplation of the contrast, too, may save me
from both: like the logic ass with the two trusses of hay on either side
of him.

CHAPTER VI

SHE

I am at home. There was never anybody who felt so strange in her home. It
is not a month since I left my sisters, and I hardly remember that I know
them. They all, and even papa, appear to be thin