No marriage there is possible; but perhaps the young lady
might suit you?' It was thus he had been married. There was an
absence in it of that romance which, though he had never
experienced it in his own life, was always present to his
imagination. His wife had often ridiculed him because he could
only live among figures and official details; but to her had not
been given the power of looking into a man's heart and feeling all
that was there. Yes;--in such bargaining for a wife, in such
bargaining for a husband, there could be nothing of the tremulous
delicacy of feminine romance; but it would be better than standing
at a stall in the market till the sufficient purchaser should
come. It never occurred to him that the delicacy, the innocence,
the romance, the bloom might all be preserved if he would give his
girl to the man whom she said she loved. Could he have modeled her
future course according to his own wishes, he would have had her
live a gentle life for the next three years, with a pencil perhaps
in her hand or a music-book before her;--and then come forth,
cleaned as it were by such quarantine from the impurity to which
she had been subjected.
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