That is my image, of course,—­not his.  It was not a simile that was in his mind, or is in anybody’s at such a moment,—­it was a pang of wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.

A lady’s wish,—­he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,—­makes slaves of us all.—­And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged pocket,—­Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,—­misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:—­John Wilkes’s—­the ugliest man’s in England—­saying, that with half-an-hour’s start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in any woman’s good graces; Cadenus—­old and savage—­leading captive Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, “And a winning tongue had he,”—­as much as to say, it is n’t looks, after all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,—­just as of old when it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.

Ah, dear me!  We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club, subjugating man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of it, and the second by our handling of it,—­we rehearse it, I say, by our own hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the exercise is easy.  But when we come to real life, the poker is in the fore, and, ten to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to hold;—­lucky for us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to leave the skin of our hands sticking to it when we fling it down or drop it with a loud or silent cry!

—­I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human character and feeling I am winding.  I meant to tell my thoughts, and to throw in a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured themselves for me from day to day.  Chance has thrown together at the table with me a number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean not only to look on them, but, if I can, through them.  You can get any man’s or woman’s secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your own, if you will only look patiently on them long enough.  Nature is always applying her reagents to character, if you will take the pains to watch her.  Our studies of character, to change the image, are very much like the surveyor’s triangulation of a geographical province.  We get a base-line in organization, always; then we get an angle by sighting some distant object to which the passions or aspirations of the subject of our observation are tending; then another;—­and so we construct our first triangle.  Once fix a man’s ideals, and for the most part the rest is easy.  A wants to die worth half a million.  Good.  B (female) wants to catch him,—­and outlive him.  All right.  Minor details at our leisure.