misfortunes which exist, and which threaten all men who are young and
free and attractive in many ways to women, as well as men. You have
lived the life of the young man of this day. You have reached a place
in your profession when you can afford to rest and marry and assume
the responsibilities of marriage. You look forward to a life of
content and peace and honorable ambition--a life, with your wife at
your side, which is to last forty or fifty years. You consider where
you will be twenty years from now, at what point of your career you
may become a judge or give up practise; your perspective is unlimited;
you even think of the college to which you may send your son. It is a
long, quiet future that you are looking forward to, and you choose my
daughter as the companion for that future, as the one woman with whom
you could live content for that length of time. And it is in that
spirit that you come to me tonight and that you ask me for my
daughter. Now I am going to ask you one question, and as you answer
that I will tell you whether or not you can have Ellen for your wife.
You look forward, as I say, to many years of life, and you have chosen
her as best suited to live that period with you; but I ask you this,
and I demand that you answer me truthfully, and that you remember that
you are speaking to her father. Imagine that I had the power to tell
you, or rather that some superhuman agent could convince you, that you
had but a month to live, and that for what you did in that month you
would not be held responsible either by any moral law or any law made
by man, and that your life hereafter would not be influenced by your
conduct in that month, would you spend it, I ask you--and on your
answer depends mine--would you spend those thirty days, with death at
the end, with my daughter, or with some other woman of whom I know
nothing?"

Latimer sat for some time silent, until indeed, his silence assumed