Perhaps Dudley Venner had not gained so much in worldly wisdom as if he had been more in society and less in his study.  The indulgence with which he treated his nephew was, no doubt, imprudent.  A man more in the habit of dealing with men would have been more guarded with a person with Dick’s questionable story and unquestionable physiognomy.  But he was singularly unsuspicious, and his natural kindness was an additional motive to the wish for introducing some variety into the routine of Elsie’s life.

If Dudley Venner did not know just what he wanted at this period of his life, there were a great many people in the town of Rockland who thought they did know.  He had been a widower long enough,—­nigh twenty year, wa’n’t it?  He’d been aout to Spraowles’s party,—­there wa’n’t anything to hender him why he shouldn’t stir raound l’k other folks.  What was the reason he didn’t go abaout to taown-meetin’s, ‘n’ Sahbath-meetin’s, ‘n’ lyceums, ‘n’ school-’xaminations, ‘n’ s’prise-parties, ‘n’ funerals,—­and other entertainments where the still-faced two-story folks were in the habit of looking round to see if any of the mansion-house gentry were present?—­Fac’ was, he was livin’ too lonesome daown there at the mansion-haouse.  Why shouldn’t he make up to the Jedge’s daughter?  She was genteel enough for him and—­let’s see, haow old was she?  Seven-’n’-twenty,—­no, six-’n’-twenty,—­Born the same year we buried aour little Anny Mari.

There was no possible objection to this arrangement, if the parties interested had seen fit to make it or even to think of it.  But “Portia,” as some of the mansion-house people called her, did not happen to awaken the elective affinities of the lonely widower.  He met her once in a while, and said to himself that she was a good specimen of the grand style of woman; and then the image came back to him of a woman not quite so large, not quite so imperial in her port, not quite so incisive in her speech, not quite so judicial in her opinions, but with two or three more joints in her frame and two or three soft inflections in her voice which for some absurd reason or other drew him to her side and so bewitched him that he told her half his secrets and looked into her eyes all that, he could not tell, in less time than it would have taken him to discuss the champion paper of the last Quarterly with the admirable “Portia.” Heu, quanta minus! How much more was that lost image to him than all it left on earth!

The study of love is very much like that of meteorology.  We know that just about so much rain will fall in a season; but on what particular day it will shower is more than we can tell.  We know that just about so much love will be made every year in a given population; but who will rain his young affections upon the heart of whom is not known except to the astrologers and fortune-tellers.  And why rain falls as it does, and why love is made just as it is, are equally puzzling questions.