his destination.

Corinth was famous for its courtesans, and he remembered suddenly that
the most celebrated were collected there; and it may have been the
courtesans that kept him from this journey, and his thoughts turning
from vice to marriage a bitterness rose up in his mind against his
father for the persistency with which Dan reminded him in and out of
season that every man's duty is to bring children into the world.

It had seemed to him that in asking him to take a wife to his discomfort
his father was asking him too much, and he had put the question aside;
but he was now without will to resist any memory that might befall him,
and for the first time he allowed his thoughts to dwell on his father's
implied regret that he had never caught his son near a servant girl's
bed. His unwillingness to impugn his father's opinions kept him
heretofore from pondering on his words, but feeling his life to be now
broken and cast away, there seemed to arise some reasons for an
examination of his father's words. They could not mean anything else
than that a young man was following the natural instincts if he lingered
about a young girl's room; and that to be without this instinct was
almost a worse misfortune than to be possessed by it to the practical
exclusion of other interests.

His father, it is true, may have argued the matter out with himself
somewhat in this fashion: that love of women in a man may be controlled;
and looking back into his own life he may have found this view
confirmed. Joseph remembered that his grandmother often spoke to him of
Dan's great love of his wife, and it might be that he had never loved
another woman; few men, however, were as fortunate as his father, and
Joseph could not help thinking that it were better to put women out of