This John Seymour was about as good and honest a man as there is going
in this world of ours. He was a generous, just, manly, religious young
fellow. He was heir to a large, solid property; he was a well-read
lawyer, established in a flourishing business; he was a man that all
the world spoke well of, and had cause to speak well of. The only
duty to society which John had left as yet unperformed was that
of matrimony. Three and thirty years had passed; and, with every
advantage for supporting a wife, with a charming home all ready for
a mistress, John, as yet, had not proposed to be the defender and
provider for any of the more helpless portion of creation. The cause
of this was, in the first place, that John was very happy in the
society of a sister, a little older than himself, who managed his
house admirably, and was a charming companion to his leisure
hours; and, in the second place, that he had a secret, bashful
self-depreciation in regard to his power of pleasing women, which made
him ill at ease in their society. Not that he did not mean to marry.
He certainly did. But the fair being that he was to marry was a
distant ideal, a certain undefined and cloudlike creature; and, up
to this time, he had been waiting to meet her, without taking any
definite steps towards that end. To say the truth, John Seymour, like
many other outwardly solid, sober-minded, respectable citizens, had
deep within himself a little private bit of romance. He could not
utter it, he never talked it; he would have blushed and stammered and
stuttered wofully, and made a very poor figure, in trying to tell any
one about it; but nevertheless it was there, a secluded chamber
of imagery, and the future Mrs. John Seymour formed its principal
ornament.

The wife that John had imaged, his _dream_-wife, was not at all like
his sister; though he loved his sister heartily, and thought her one