Page:The Europeans (1st edition) Volume 2.djvu/17

 if your question makes me smile a little. To begin with, I have never entertained an idea. Ideas often entertain me; but I am afraid I have never seriously made a plan. I know what you are going to say; or rather, I know what you think, for I don't think you will say it—that this is very frivolous and loose-minded on my part. So it is; but I am made like that; I take things as they come, and somehow there is always some new thing to follow the last. In the second place, I should never propose to settle. I can't settle, my dear uncle; I am not a settler. I know that is what strangers are supposed to do here; they always settle. But I haven't—to answer your question—entertained that idea."