hoped and expected that she would. But Dacres!

Dacres should exercise the greatest possible discretion. He was not
a person who could throw the dice indifferently with fate. He could
respond to so much, and he would inevitably, sooner or later, demand
so much response! He was governed by a preposterously exacting
temperament, and he wore his nerves outside. And what vision he
had! How he explored the world he lived in and drew out of it all
there was, all there was! I could see him in the years to come
ranging alone the fields that were sweet and the horizons that
lifted for him, and ever returning to pace the common dusty mortal
road by the side of a purblind wife. On general principles, as a
case to point at, it would be a conspicuous pity. Nor would it lack
the aspect of a particular, a personal misfortune. Dacres was
occupied in quite the natural normal degree with his charming self;
he would pass his misery on, and who would deserve to escape it less
than his mother-in-law?

I listened to Emily Morgan, who gleaned in the ship more information
about Dacres Tottenham's people, pay, and prospects than I had ever
acquired, and I kept an eye upon the pair which was, I flattered
myself, quite maternal. I watched them without acute anxiety,
deploring the threatening destiny, but hardly nearer to it than one
is in the stalls to the stage. My moments of real concern for
Dacres were mingled more with anger than with sorrow--it seemed
inexcusable that he, with his infallible divining-rod for
temperament, should be on the point of making such an ass of
himself. Though I talk of the stage there was nothing at all
dramatic to reward my attention, mine and Emily Morgan's. To my
imagination, excited by its idea of what Dacres Tottenham's