Would she preserve her beautiful responsiveness to his ascendency?  Hitherto she had, and for years, and quite fresh.  But how of her as a married woman?  Our souls are hideously subject to the conditions of our animal nature!  A wife, possibly mother, it was within sober calculation that there would be great changes in her.  And the hint of any change appeared a total change to one of the lofty order who, when they are called on to relinquish possession instead of aspiring to it, say, All or nothing!

Well, but if there was danger of the marriage-tie effecting the slightest alteration of her character or habit of mind, wherefore press it upon a tolerably hardened spinster!

Besides, though he did once put her hand in Vernon’s for the dance, he remembered acutely that the injury then done by his generosity to his tender sensitiveness had sickened and tarnished the effulgence of two or three successive anniversaries of his coming of age.  Nor had he altogether yet got over the passion of greed for the whole group of the well-favoured of the fair sex, which in his early youth had made it bitter for him to submit to the fickleness, not to say the modest fickleness, of any handsome one of them in yielding her hand to a man and suffering herself to be led away.  Ladies whom he had only heard of as ladies of some beauty incurred his wrath for having lovers or taking husbands.  He was of a vast embrace; and do not exclaim, in covetousness;—­for well he knew that even under Moslem law he could not have them all—­but as the enamoured custodian of the sex’s purity, that blushes at such big spots as lovers and husbands; and it was unbearable to see it sacrificed for others.  Without their purity what are they!—­what are fruiterer’s plums?—­unsaleable.  O for the bloom on them!

“As I said, I lose my right hand in Vernon,” he resumed, “and I am, it seems, inevitably to lose him, unless we contrive to fasten him down here.  I think, my dear Miss Dale, you have my character.  At least, I should recommend my future biographer to you—­with a caution, of course.  You would have to write selfishness with a dash under it.  I cannot endure to lose a member of my household—­not under any circumstances; and a change of feeling toward me on the part of any of my friends because of marriage, I think hard.  I would ask you, how can it be for Vernon’s good to quit an easy pleasant home for the wretched profession of Literature?—­wretchedly paying, I mean,” he bowed to the authoress.  “Let him leave the house, if he imagines he will not harmonize with its young mistress.  He is queer, though a good fellow.  But he ought, in that event, to have an establishment.  And my scheme for Vernon—­men, Miss Dale, do not change to their old friends when they marry—­my scheme, which would cause the alteration in his system of life to be barely perceptible, is to build him a poetical little cottage, large enough for a couple, on the borders of my park.  I have the spot in my eye.  The point is, can he live alone there?  Men, I say, do not change.  How is it that we cannot say the same of women?”