a lower and more dejected tone:

"If you were not to be a sharer in my renown, should I be so fortunate
as to acquire it, I should feel as if it were selfish to dwell so much
on my passion for distinction, and my devotion to my pencil as a means
of winning it. My heart is full of you--but it is full of ambition,
too, paradox though it be. I cannot live ignoble. I should not have
felt worthy to press my love upon you--worthy to possess you--except
with the prospect of celebrity in my art. You make the world dark to
me, Fanny! You close down the sky, when you shut out this hope! Yet it
shall be so."

Philip paused a moment, and the silence was uninterrupted.

"There was another feeling I had, upon which I have not insisted," he
continued. "By my brother's project, I am to reside almost wholly
abroad. Even the little stipend I have to offer you now is absorbed of
course by the investment of my property in his trading capital, and
marriage, till I have partly enriched myself, would be even more
hopeless than at present. Say the interval were five years--and five
years of separation!"

"With happiness in prospect, it would soon pass, my dear Philip!"

"But is there nothing wasted in this time? My life is yours--the gift
of love. Are not these coming five years the very flower of it!--a
mutual loss, too, for are they not, even more emphatically, the very
flower of yours? Eighteen and twenty-five are ages at which to marry,
not ages to defer. During this time the entire flow of my existence is
at its crowning fulness--passion, thought, joy, tenderness,
susceptibility to beauty and sweetness--all I have that can be
diminished or tarnished, or made dull by advancing age and contact with
the world, is thrown away--for its spring and summer. Will the autumn
of life repay us for this? Will it--even if we are rich and blest with
health, and as capable of an unblemished union as now? Think of this a
moment, dear Fanny!"

"I do--it is full of force and meaning, and, could we marry now, with a
tolerable prospect of competency, it would be irresistible. But poverty
in wedlock, Philip--"

"What do you call poverty? If we can suffice for each other, and have
the necessaries of life, we are not poor! My art will bring us
consideration enough--which is the main end of wealth, after all--and,
of society, speaking for myself only, I want nothing. Luxuries for
yourself, Fanny--means for your dear comfort and pleasure--you should
not