Page:Paul Clifford Vol 3.djvu/204

196 only; mine was the world of imagination,)—had she but condescended to learn my nature, to subdue the woman's devil at her own, I could have lived on in this babbling hermitage for ever, and fancied myself happy and resigned—I could have become a different being. I fancy I could have become what your moralists—(quacks!)—call 'good.' But this fretting frivolity of heart—this lust of fool's praise—this peevishness of temper—this sullenness in answer to the moody thought, which in me she neither fathomed nor forgave—this vulgar, daily, hourly pining at the paltry pinches of the body's poverty, the domestic whine, the household complaint,—when I—I have not a thought for such pitiful trials of affection; and all this while, my curses, my buried hope, and disguised spirit and sunken name not thought of; the magnitude of my surrender to her not even comprehended; nay, her 'inconveniences,'—a dim hearth, I suppose, or a daintyless table,—compared, ay, absolutely compared with all which I abandoned for her sake! As if it were not enough,—had I been a fool, an ambitionless, soulless fool,—the mere thought that I had linked my name to that of a