the situation. He praised the lady,
therefore, with a humorous appreciation of the manner in which she
accepted flatteries which were passed, so to say, upon a shovel, and
he tasted with a gratified palate his own fine flavour as a man of the
world.

That was the silly beginning of it, and the lonely man, recalling it all
as if he had been back in the midst of it again, asked himself with that
tired scorn of his own career and nature which had become a part of him,
if any creature with as much brain as earwax had ever before been so
easily beckoned to the devil.

'Millions, I suppose,' he said half aloud, in answer to his own mental
query--'millions.'

And so went on with his dream.

Of the variety of fools there is literally no end, but for the king of
fool who is predestined to come a cropper in the field of life, and
to spill other people in his own downfall, there is no rival for the
Quixote. The man who is over-anxious to pay in the market of morals
is the man who goes bankrupt You may be a good deal of a scoundrel and
retain your own esteem and that of the world, but you must not palter
with your own offences. The world resents a half-virtue, and the
world is right It is the half-virtue which breeds hypocrisy and
self-deception, and these are the most despicable of human vices.
Courage is at the root of manhood, and even the courage which dares
to do wrong and have done with it is better than the cowardice which
patches vice with virtue until it can no longer discern the colour of
either.

Here, for instance, began a liaison of the vulgarest and simplest kind,
for which a man of any wisdom would have repented in due course whilst
he would have compounded with it, and would have parted from it, and,
whilst counting it amongst the sins and follies of his youth, would have
left it behind him.

Paul and the girl parted innocently that night, but made an appointment
to meet again on the morrow. He had no stomach for the encounter, but
he would not break his word, and so, for the sake of a punctilio, he
wrecked himself. He and Annette went to the Mabille together, and in his
character of man of the world he made love to her with as fine a relish
as if he had sat down to bread-and-water after dinner; then, in order
not to be quite a blackguard, he met her again, and, to save himself
from his own conscience, again, and at last the compound of vanity,
weakness, and virtue landed him with her in London, where they