"Tell me, all the same," said Julie, with an involuntary petulant
gesture.

"Very well, child, listen to me. Girls are apt to imagine noble and
enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have
fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and
then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections
of their day-dreams, and put their trust in him. They fall in love
with this imaginary creature in the man of their choice; and then,
when it is too late to escape from their fate, behold their first
idol, the illusion made fair with their fancies, turns to an odious
skeleton. Julie, I would rather have you fall in love with an old man
than with the Colonel. Ah! if you could but see things from the
standpoint of ten years hence, you would admit that my old experience
was right. I know what Victor is, that gaiety of his is simply animal
spirits--the gaiety of the barracks. He has no ability, and he is a
spendthrift. He is one of those men whom Heaven created to eat and
digest four meals a day, to sleep, to fall in love with the first
woman that comes to hand, and to fight. He does not understand life.
His kind heart, for he has a kind heart, will perhaps lead him to give
his purse to a sufferer or to a comrade; _but_ he is careless, he has
not the delicacy of heart which makes us slaves to a woman's
happiness, he is ignorant, he is selfish. There are plenty of
_buts_--"

"But, father, he must surely be clever, he must have ability, or he
would not be a colonel--"

"My dear, Victor will be a colonel all his life.--I have seen no one
who appears to me to be worthy of you," the old father added, with a