his blood-relations did or said, as he
had not felt since the day when, in their midst, he had struggled to
assert his independence. How little they understood him! It was like
them, in their unimaginative dulness, to suppose that they could
arrange his life for him--draw up the lines on which it was to be
spent. He saw himself bound down hand and foot again, to the occupation
he so hated; saw himself striving to oust the young person from London,
just as no doubt his old friend had striven; saw himself becoming
proficient in all the mean, petty tricks of rival teachers, and either
vanquishing or being vanquished, in the effort to earn a living.

However he viewed them, his prospects had nothing hopeful in them. They
were vague, too, to the last degree. On one question alone was his mind
made up: he meant to marry Louise at the earliest possible date.
Whatever else happened, this should come to pass. For the first time,
he thought with something akin to remorse, over the turn affairs had
taken. He had been blind and dizzy with his infatuation, sick for her
to his very marrow--he could only look back on those feverish weeks in
June as on the horrors of a nightmare--and he would not have missed a
single hour of the happy days at Rochlitz. But, none the less, he had
always felt a peculiar aversion to people who allowed their feelings to
get the better of them. Now, he himself was one of them. If only she
were his wife! Had she consented, he would have married her there and
then, without reflection. They might have lived on, just as they were
going to do, and have kept their marriage a secret, reserving to
themselves the pleasure of knowing that their intimacy was legal. At it
was, he must console himself with the thought that, married or not,
they were indissolubly bound: he knew now better than before, that no
other woman would ever exist for him; and surely, in the case of an
all-absorbing passion such as this, the overstepping of conventional
boundaries would not be counted too heavily against them: laws and
conventions existed only for the weak and vacillating loves of the rest
of the world.

Then, however, and almost against his will, the other side of the
question forced itself upon his notice. As the marriage had not already
taken place, as, indeed, Louise chose to evade the subject when he
brought it up, he could not but admit to it would be pleasanter for him
if it were now postponed until he was independent of