were unworldly or sentimental. Neither did he know how far to take
what he read and use it in his daily life. He often selected some
fantastical motive which he had found set forth as operative in one
of his heroes, and he brought it into his business, much to the
astonishment of his masters and customers. For this reason he was
not stable. He changed employers two or three times; and, so far as
I could make out, his ground of objection to each of the firms whom
he left might have been a ground of dislike in a girl to a suitor,
but certainly nothing more. During the intervals of his engagements,
unless he was pressed for money, he did nothing--not from laziness,
but because he had got a notion in his head that his mind wanted rest
and reinvigoration. His habit then was to consume the whole day--day
after day--in reading or in walking out by himself. It may easily be
supposed that with a temperament like his, and with nobody near him
to take him by the hand, he made great mistakes. His wife and he
cared nothing for one another, but she was jealous to the last
degree. I never saw such jealousy. It was strange that, although
she almost hated him, she watched him with feline sharpness and
patience, and would even have killed any woman whom she knew had won
his affection. He, on the other hand, openly avowed that marriage
without love was nothing, and flaunted without the least modification
the most ideal theories as to the relation between man and woman.
Not that he ever went actually wrong. His boyish education, his
natural purity, and a fear never wholly suppressed, restrained him.
He exasperated people by his impracticability, and it must be
acknowledged that it is very irritating in a difficult complexity
demanding the gravest consideration--the balancing of this against
that--to hear a man suddenly propose some naked principle with which
everybody is acquainted, and decide by it solely. I came to know him
through M'Kay, who had known him for years; but M'Kay at last broke