It had sometimes occurred to George to wonder why a man so popular with women, so "rising" as Robert Meredith, a man who had undoubtedly, in default of some untoward accident, a brilliant professional career and all its concomitant social advantages before him, had not married; but this was a matter on which he would not have considered that even their close friendship would have justified him in putting any questions to Meredith. The _tu quoque_ which might have been Meredith's reply was of easy explanation. George Ritherdon had had a disappointment in his youth, and had never thought seriously about marriage since. The disappointment had taken place in his early imprudent days, when no connection, even distantly collateral, existed in his mind between money and marriage, and he had long since arrived at the conviction that, even if it did come into his head or heart to fall in love again, he could not afford to marry, and therefore must, acting upon the gentlemanly precepts which had always governed him, resist any such inclination as dishonourable to himself and ungenerous towards its object. The world had "marched" to a very quick step indeed since the days of George's almost boyhood, when the beautiful but penniless Camilla Jackson had fascinated him "into fits" at a carpet dance in the neighbourhood of his father's house, and he had forthwith set to work, in the fervent realms of his imagination, to fit up, furnish, and start a most desirable and charming little establishment, to be presided over by that young lady in the delightful capacity of wife. Of course the beautiful Camilla was always to be attired in the choicest French millinery and the clearest white muslins. Laundresses' bills had no place, nor had those of the _modiste_, in the unsophisticated imagination of the young man, and breakages were as far from his thoughts as babies. George had lived and learned since then, and he dreamed no more dreams now; he knew better. Unless some tremendous, wholly unexpected, and extravagantly-unlikely piece of good luck should come in his way--something about as probable as the adventures of Sindbad or Prince Camaralzaman, in which case he would immediately look about for an eligible young lady to take the larger share of it off his unaccustomed hands--George would now never marry. Camilla had disdained the white muslin and the millinery regardless of the washing bill, of which indeed she had early been taught by an exemplary and fearfully managing mother to be ceaselessly reminiscent; and George not unfrequently saw her now in a carriage, the mere varnish whereof told of wealth of perfectly aggressive amount, in a carriage crammed with healthy, clean, rich-looking children, and gorgeously arrayed in velvets and furs of great price.