Observe how fatefully he who has a scheme is the engine of it; he is no longer the man of his tastes or of his principles; he is on a line of rails for a terminus; and he may cast languishing eyes across waysides to right and left, he has doomed himself to proceed, with a self-devouring hunger for the half desired; probably manhood gone at the embrace of it.  This may be or not, but Nature has decreed to him the forfeit of pleasure.  She bids us count the passage of a sober day for the service of the morrow; that is her system; and she would have us adopt it, to keep in us the keen edge for cutting, which is the guarantee of enjoyment:  doing otherwise, we lose ourselves in one or other of the furious matrix instincts; we are blunt to all else.

Young Dudley fully agreed that the choice must be with Miss Radnor; he alluded to her virtues, her accomplishments.  He was waxing to fervidness.  He said he must expect competitors; adding, on a start, that he was to say, from his mother, she, in the case of an intention to present Miss Radnor at Court . . . .

Victor waved hand for a finish, looking as though, his head had come out of hot water.  He sacrificed Royalty to his necessities, under a kind of sneer at its functions:  ’Court! my girl?  But the arduous duties are over for the season.  We are a democratic people retaining the seductions of monarchy, as a friend says; and of course a girl may like to count among the flowers of the kingdom for a day, in the list of Court presentations; no harm.  Only there’s plenty of time . . . very young girls have their heads turned—­though I don’t say, don’t imagine, my girl would.  By and by perhaps.’

Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling’s room and introduced to the figure-head of the Firm of Inchling, Pennergate, and Radnor:  a respectable City merchant indeed, whom Dudley could read-off in a glimpse of the downright contrast to his partner.  He had heard casual remarks on the respectable City of London merchant from Colney Durance.  A short analytical gaze at him, helped to an estimate of the powers of the man who kept him up.  Mr. Inchling was a florid City-feaster, descendant of a line of City merchants, having features for a wife to identify; as drovers, they tell us, can single one from another of their round-bellied beasts.  Formerly the leader of the Firm, he was now, after dreary fits of restiveness, kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor’s obedient cart-horse.  He sighed in set terms for the old days of the Firm, when, like trouts in the current, the Firm had only to gape for shoals of good things to fatten it:  a tale of English prosperity in quiescence; narrated interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to make it our national Poem.