to secure it at the cost of temporary suffering.  I have a passion for nothing—­not even for life.  I know very well the appearance I make in the world.  I pass for a clever, accomplished, capable, good-natured fellow, who can do anything if he would only try.  I am supposed to be rather cultivated, to have latent talents.  When I was younger I used to find a certain entertainment in the spectacle of human affairs.  I liked to see men and women hurrying on each other’s heels across the stage.  But I am sick and tired of them now; not that I am a misanthrope, God forbid!  They are not worth hating.  I never knew but one creature who was, and her I went and loved.  To be consistent, I ought to have hated my mother, and now I ought to detest Theodore.  But I don’t—­truly, on the whole, I don’t—­any more than I dote on him.  I firmly believe that it makes a difference to him, his idea that I am fond of him.  He believes in that, as he believes in all the rest of it—­in my culture, my latent talents, my underlying “earnestness,” my sense of beauty and love of truth.  Oh, for a man among them all—­a fellow with eyes in his head—­eyes that would know me for what I am and let me see they had guessed it.  Possibly such a fellow as that might get a “rise” out of me.

In the name of bread and butter, what am I to do? (I was obliged this morning to borrow fifty dollars from Theodore, who remembered gleefully that he has been owing me a trifling sum for the past four years, and in fact has preserved a note to this effect.) Within the last week I have hatched a desperate plan:  I have made up my mind to take a wife—­a rich one, bien entendu.  Why not accept the goods of the gods?  It is not my fault, after all, if I pass for a good fellow.  Why not admit that practically, mechanically—­as I may say—­maritally, I may be a good fellow?  I warrant myself kind.  I should never beat my wife; I don’t think I should even contradict her.  Assume that her fortune has the proper number of zeros and that she herself is one of them, and I can even imagine her adoring me.  I really think this is my only way.  Curiously, as I look back upon my brief career, it all seems to tend to this consummation.  It has its graceful curves and crooks, indeed, and here and there a passionate tangent; but on the whole, if I were to unfold it here a la Hogarth, what better legend could I scrawl beneath the series of pictures than So-and-So’s Progress to a Mercenary Marriage?

Coming events do what we all know with their shadows.  My noble fate is, perhaps, not far off.  I already feel throughout my person a magnificent languor—­as from the possession of many dollars.  Or is it simply my sense of well-being in this perfectly appointed house?  Is it simply the contact of the highest civilization I have known?  At all events, the place is of velvet, and my only complaint of Mr. Sloane is that, instead of an old widower, he’s not an old widow (or a young maid), so that I might marry