Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/50

 "Duty is a cold-eyed monitress, reserved, inflexible, severe; Ambition, a high-born lady, haughty, capricious, unfeeling, like those dainty dames of old patrician Rome,

Pleasure, a laughing, lavish courtezan, gay, gaudy, thoughtless, slave to the impression of the hour. This last you may buy at your will for a handful of silver, or, at most, a talent of gold; and there are few, alas! who have not learned how soon her false smile palls upon the fancy, her painted cheek grows irksome to the eye. The second you must woo, with many a stealthy footstep, many a cringing bow, offering at her shrine truth, honour, self-respect, to find, if you are so fortunate as not to be discarded like a pair of worn-out gloves, that you have only gathered a nut without a kernel, after all. For the first, you must