athedral city which is situated in its
centre. His own affair with Lady Dawlish is, he firmly believes, known
to no human being save themselves and their confidential servants: he
little dreams that it has been the gossip of all London until London
grew tired of it; he is indeed aware that everybody invited them in the
kindest manner together, but he attributed this coincidence to her tact
in the management of her set and choice of her own engagements.

The human mind is like the ostrich: its own projects serve to it the
purpose which sand plays to the ostrich: comfortably buried in them, it
defies the scrutiny of mankind; wrapped in its own absorbing passions,
it leaves its hansom before a lady's hall door, or leaves its coroneted
handkerchief on a bachelor's couch, and never dreams that the world is
looking on round the corner or through the keyhole. Human nature the
moment it is interested becomes blind. Therefore the duke has put his
question in good faith.

He would abhor any kind of scandal. He is devoted to his mother, who is
a pious and very proper person; he has a conscientious sense of his own
vast duties and responsibilities; he would feel most uncomfortable if he
thought people were talking grossly of him in his own county; and he has
a horror of Lord Dawlish, noisy, insolent, coarse, a gambler and a rake.

Arrived at his bedroom door, Mr. Wootten is touched vaguely with a kind
feeling towards his humble interrogator, or with some other sentiment
less kindly, it may be. He pauses, looks straight before him at the wick
of his candle, and speaks with that oracular air so becoming to him
which many ungrateful people are known to loathe.

"That kind of connections are invariably dangerous; invariably," he
remarks. "They have their uses, I admit, they have their uses: they
mould a man's manners when he is young, they enable him to acquire great
insight into female character, they keep him out of the lower sorts of
entanglements, and they are useful in restraining him from premature
marriage. But they are perilous if allowed to last too long. If
permitted to claim privileges, rights, usurpations, they are apt to
become irksome and compromising, especially if the lady be no longer
young. When a woman is no longer young there is a desperate
_acharnement_ in her tenacity about a last passion which is like that of
the mariner clinging to a spar in the midst of a gusty sea. It is not
easy for the spar to disengage i