Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/302

292[February 27, 1869] it, or are you a philospher, and able to despise anything that a woman can do to hurt you? If the latter, come up to town at once, and I will exhibit you in a show as a lusus naturæ, and we will divide the profits and make our fortunes.

"And while on that subject, Walter, let me drop my old cynical fun, and talk to you for a minute honestly and with all the affection of which my hard, warped, crabbed nature is capable. I can write to you what I couldn't say to you, my boy, and you won't think me gushing when I tell you that my heart had been tight locked and barred for years before I saw you, and that I don't think I've been any the worse since you found a key somehow—God knows how—to unlock it. Now then, after that little bit of maudlin nonsense, to what I was going to say. The first time we were ever in my old room together talking over your future, I proposed to start you for Australia. You declined, saying that you couldn't possibly leave England, and when I pressed you about the ties that bound you here, and learned that you had no father or mother, you boggled, and hesitated, and broke down, and I was obliged to help you out of your sentence by changing the subject. Do you remember all that? And do you think I didn't know what it all meant? That marvellous stupidity of young men, which prevents them from thinking that any one has ever been young, but themselves! I knew that it meant that you were in love, Walter, and that's what I want to ask you about. From that hour until the day we pressed hands in farewell at Euston-square, you never alluded to her again! In the long letter which you sent me, and which now lies before me, a letter treating fully of your present and your future life, there is no word of her! Don't think I am surprised at a fine, generous, hearty, hopeful young fellow not giving his love-confidence to a withered, dried-up old skittle like myself; I never expected it; I should not mention it now, save that I fear that the state of affairs can be scarcely satisfactory between you, or you, who have placed your whole story unreservedly before me, would not have hidden this most important part of it. Nor do I want to ask you for a confidence which you have not volunteered. I only wish you to examine the matter calmly, quietly, and under the exercise of your common sense, of which you have plenty. And if it is unsatisfactory in any way—give it up! Yes, Walter, give it up! It sounds harshly, ridiculously, I know, but it is honest advice, and if I had had any one to say it to me, years and years ago, and to enforce my adoption of it, I should have been a very different man. Believe in no woman's love, Walter, trust no woman's looks, or words, or vows. 'First of all would I fly from the cruel madness of love,' says Mr. Tennyson, and he is right. Cruel madness, indeed! we laugh at the wretched lunatic who dons a paper crown, and holds a straw for a sceptre, while all the time we are hugging our own tinsel vanities, and exulting in our own sham state! That's where the swells have the pull, my boy! They have no nonsense about mutual love, and fitness, and congeniality, and all that stuff, which is fitted for nothing but Valentine-mongers and penny romancists; they are not very wise, but they know that the dominant passion in a man's heart is admiration of beauty, the dominant passion in a woman's is ambition, and they go quietly into the mart and arrange the affair, on the excellent principle of barter. When I was your age I could not believe in this, had high hopes and aspirations, and scouted the idea of woman's inconstancy—went on loving, and hoping, and trusting, from month to month, and from year to year, wore out my youth and my freshness and my hope, and was then flung aside and discarded, the victim of 'better opportunities' and 'improved position.' Oh, Lord! I never intended to open my mouth about this, but if you ever want to hear the whole story, I'll tell you some day. Meanwhile, think over these hints, my boy! Life's too short and too hard as it is, and—verbum sap.

"Most probably you'll never take any further notice of me, after that. If you have corns, I must have been hard and heavy upon them, and you'll curse my impertinence; if you haven't you'll think me the prosiest of old bores. Just like me. I see plainly that I must have made a mess of it, which ever way it turns up.

"You tell me to send you news. Not much about; but what there is, encouraging and good for the cause. There is very little doubt that at the general election, which will come off in a few months, we shall be stronger by far than we ever expected, and shall cut the combs of some of those aristocrats and plutocrats very close indeed. There is a general feeling that blood and money bags have divided the spoil too long, and that worth and intellect may be allowed a chance of being brought