knows it is well
to have the five daughters, rather than to live with plenty of beef
and mutton,--even with the ortolans if you will,--and with no one to
care whether his body may be racked in this world or his spirit in
the next. I do not say whether the balance of good or evil be on one
side or the other; but when a man is going to do a thing he should
know what it is he is going to do."

"The reading of all this," said Hamel, "is, that if I succeed in
marrying Miss Dormer I must have thin locks, and a bad hat, and a
butcher's bill."

"Other men do."

"Some, instead, have balances at their bankers, and die worth thirty,
forty, or fifty thousand pounds, to the great consolation of the five
daughters."

"Or a hundred thousand pounds! There is, of course, no end to
the amount of thousands which a successful professional man may
accumulate. You may be the man; but the question is, whether you
should not have reasonable ground to suppose yourself the man, before
you encumber yourself with the five daughters."

"It seems to me," said Hamel, "that the need of such assurance is
cowardly."

"That is just the question which I am always debating with myself. I
also want to rid myself of that swingebuckler flavour. I feel that
for me, like Adam, it is not good that I should be alone. I would
fain ask the first girl, that I could love well enough to wish
to make myself one with her, to be my wife, regardless of hats,
butchers, and daughters. It is a plucky and a fine thing for a man to
feel that he can make his back broad enough for all burdens. But yet
what is the good of thinking that you can carry a sack of wheat when
you are sure that you have not, in truth, strength to raise it from
the ground?"

"Strength will come," said Hamel.

"Yes, and the bad hat. And, worse than the bad hat, the soiled gown;
and perhaps with the soiled gown the altered heart;--and perhaps with
the altered heart an absence of all that tenderness which it is a
woman's special right to expect from a man."

"I should have thought you would have been the last to be so
self-diffident."

"To be so thoughtful, you mean," said the Colonel. "I am unattached
now, and having had no special duty for the last three months I have
given myself over to thinking in a nasty morbid manner. It comes,
I daresay, partly from tobacco. But there is comfort in this,--that
no such reflections falling out of one man's mouth ever had the
slightest effect in influen