‘And do you think that, if I were unhappy, the wear and fret of public life, the dealing with workers whose chief object seems to be to frustrate and stultify each other’s efforts; to be continually baulked and disappointed; to have my most generous impulses ridiculed, my loftiest hopes cried down as the dreams of a madman; perhaps, at the close of my career, after I had given my days and nights, my brain and body, to the public cause, to be denounced as an incendiary and a lunatic—do you think a career of that kind would ensure happiness? No, love, Providence, in its divine wisdom, has allowed me to belong to the lotus-eating class. Let me nibble my lotus, and lie at ease in my sunshiny valley, and be content to let others enjoy the rapture of the fray.’ ‘If I could be sure that you were happy,’ faltered Lina, feeling very unhappy herself. ‘Ought I not to be happy, when you are so good to me?’ he asked, taking her hand and pressing it tenderly, with very real affection, but an affection chastened by remorse. ‘I am as happy as a man can be who has inherited a natural bent to melancholy. My mother was not a cheerful woman, as you know.’ This was an undeniable fact. Lady Geraldine, after having made what some people called a splendid marriage, and others a _mésalliance_, had gone through life with an air of subdued melancholy, an elegant pensiveness which suited her languid beauty as well as the colours she chose for her gowns, or the flowers she wore in her hair. She had borne herself with infinite grace, as one whose cup of life was tinctured with sorrow, beneath the snowy calm of whose bosom the slow consuming fire of grief was working its gradual ravages. She died of an altogether commonplace disease, but she contrived so to bear herself in her decay, that when she was dead everybody was convinced she had perished slowly of a broken heart, and that she had never smiled after her marriage with Mr. Giles-Goring. This was society’s verdict upon a woman who had lived an utterly selfish and self-indulgent life, and who had spent fifteen hundred a-year upon her milliner.