‘The best thing you can do, Sir Watkin, and I wish you well through it. I am not a marrying man myself. I never was. I am getting too old for it, and I could not afford it if I wished. When we are young we have dreams of love in a cottage, and try to persuade ourselves that what is enough for one is enough for two; that there is nothing half so sweet as love’s young dream. But, oh, the terrible awakening, when the dream is over, and the grim-reality of poverty stalks in at the door, and the husband has endless toil, and the wife endless sorrow, and even then the wolf is not kept from the door; and things are worse when the happy couple come to their senses and feel what fools they have been. There is little room for love then. I believe matrimony is the sin of the age. No one can pretend now that to increase and multiply is the whole duty of man. The world is over-peopled, half of the people of England cannot get a decent living as it is. Why am I to drag a respectable woman down into the depths of poverty? Why, I ask, is she to drag me down? I have my comforts, my clubs, my amusements, my occupations, my position in society. Were I married I should lose them all, unless I married a Miss Kilmansegg with her golden leg. But your case is different, Sir Watkin. You are bound to marry. It is a duty you to owe to your ancestors, who have given you title and fortune, to continue the family.’ It may be that some may not approve of this style of talk. They may question the need of great hereditary families. They may go so far as to insinuate that the happiness of such few individuals is often inconsistent with the welfare of the many; that the system which keeps up such is an artificial one; that the true aim of legislation should be the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Respectability in wonder may well ask what next? But in the coming era respectability will have a good deal to wonder about. CHAPTER XXI. AN UNPLEASANT RENCONTRE. Left alone with himself, Sir Watkin revolved many things. He was not sorry after all, he tried to persuade himself, that he was not in Parliament. He was no eager politician, and he had none of that fatal fluency when on his legs, so common in our day among the ambitious clerks and traders who join Parliamentary societies, and figure in them with the hope at some time or other of calling themselves M.P.’s. It was time, he thought, that he should again try his luck in the matrimonial market, and, indeed, he had almost made up his mind to secure a prize which had been temptingly displayed.