and if you are only a man in the making, you have recognised
that yours was quite a special case, and you yourself not
guilty of your own pestiferous career.

Granted, and with all my heart. Let us accept these
apologies; let us agree that you are nobody's enemy but your
own; let us agree that you are a sort of moral cripple,
impotent for good; and let us regard you with the unmingled
pity due to such a fate. But there is one thing to which, on
these terms, we can never agree: - we can never agree to have
you marry. What! you have had one life to manage, and have
failed so strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to
conjoin with it the management of some one else's? Because
you have been unfaithful in a very little, you propose
yourself to be a ruler over ten cities. You strip yourself by
such a step of all remaining consolations and excuses. You
are no longer content to be your own enemy; you must be your
wife's also. You have been hitherto in a mere subaltern
attitude; dealing cruel blows about you in life, yet only half
responsible, since you came there by no choice or movement of
your own. Now, it appears, you must take things on your own
authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and for all
that your wife suffers, no one is responsible but you. A man
must be very certain of his knowledge ere he undertake to
guide a ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous pass; you have
eternally missed your way in life, with consequences that you
still deplore, and yet you masterfully seize your wife's hand,
and, blindfold, drag her after you to ruin. And it is your
wife, you observe, whom you select. She, whose happiness you
most desire, you choose to be your victim. You would