He blew forth quick clouds of heavy smoke, as he attempted to make himself believe that this was all for the best.  What would such a one as he was do with a wife?  Or, seeing as he did see, that marriage itself was quite out of the question, how could it be good either for him or her that they should be tied together by a long engagement?  Such a future would not at all suit the purpose of his life.  In his life absolute freedom would be needed, freedom from unnecessary ties, freedom from unnecessary burdens.  His income was most precarious and he certainly would not make it less so by submission to any closer literary thraldom.  And he believed himself to be a Bohemian, too much of a Bohemian to enjoy a domestic fireside with children and slippers.  To be free to go where he liked, and when he liked, to think as he pleased, to be driven nowhere by conventional rules, to use his days, Sundays as well as Mondays, as he pleased to use them; to turn Republican, if his mind should take him that way or Quaker, or Mormon or Red Indian, if he wished it, and in so turning to do no damage to any one but himself—­that was the life which he had planned for himself.  His aunt Stanbury had not read his character altogether wrongly, as he thought, when she had once declared that decency and godliness were both distasteful to him.  Would it not be destruction to such a one as he was, to fall into an interminable engagement with any girl, let her be ever so sweet?

But yet, he felt as he sat there filling pipe after pipe, smoking away till past midnight, that though he could not bear the idea of trammels, though he was totally unfit for matrimony, either present or in prospect, he felt that he had within his breast a double identity, and that that other division of himself would be utterly crushed if it were driven to divest itself of the idea of love.  Whence was to come his poetry, the romance of his life, the springs of clear water in which his ignoble thoughts were to be dipped till they should become pure, if love was to be banished altogether from the list of delights that were possible to him?  And then he began to speculate on love—­that love of which poets wrote, and of which he found that some sparkle was necessary to give light to his life.  Was it not the one particle of divine breath given to man, of which he had heard since he was a boy?  And how was this love to be come at, and was it to be a thing of reality, or merely an idea?  Was it a pleasure to be attained or a mystery that, charmed by the difficulties of the distance, a distance that never could be so passed, that the thing should really be reached?  Was love to be ever a delight, vague as is that feeling of unattainable beauty which far-off mountains give, when you know that you can never place yourself amidst their unseen valleys?  And if love could be reached, the love of which the poets sing, and of which his own heart was ever singing, what were to be its pleasures?  To press a hand, to