Page:Far from the Maddening Girls.djvu/18

 done with landladies and table d’hote dinners; to be sure, under all conditions, of finding a button where a button ought to be; to know the unspeakable wealth of comfort and seclusion which is miraculously packed into the limited compass of that little word “Home!” In short, I yearned to become a bachelor, and this was precisely what the benignant performance of my Uncle Ezra enabled me to do.

Perhaps it is necessary to explain that one cannot be a thoroughly authentic bachelor under five thousand a year. Short of that income, one may, of course, remain unmarried; but to remain unmarried means nothing more than to be a single man — a creature, that is, commonly supposed to be conditioned not so much by his inclinations as by material circumstance. Who, pray, is going to believe that he is single because he chooses to be, instead of because he must? He may have all the courage of his conviction, but he can