“My dear Emily! to please me you have only to be happy yourself,” he answered, with real affection. “Ah! that is just the one thing that I cannot do. My life is all wrong somehow, and I cannot make it right. I have been trying to square the circle, ever since my marriage--with such unspeakable care and trouble--and the circle is no nearer being square. The impracticable, unmeasurable curves still remain, and are not to be squared by my power of calculation.” “Ah, Emily, if you had only trusted in me, and waited!” “Ah, Laurence, if you had only spoken a little sooner!” “I would not speak till I had secured a certain income. I had been taught to believe that no woman in your position could exist without a certain expenditure.” “Ah, that is the false philosophy of your modern school! A man tells himself that with such or such a woman he could live happily all the days of his life, but his friends warn him that the lady has been educated in a certain style, and must therefore be extravagant--so he keeps aloof from her; and some day, necessity, family ambition, weariness, pique, anger--Heaven knows what incomprehensible feminine impulse--tempts her to the utterance of the most fatal lie a woman’s lips can shape. She marries a man she can never love, and she has her equipage, and her servants, and her house in Mayfair, and all the splendours _he_ has been told she cannot live without: and she _does_ live--the life of the world, which is living death.” “For God’s sake no more! You stab me to the heart.” He covered his face with his hands, and thought of what she had been saying to him. Yes, it was all true! His worldly wisdom had blighted that fair young life. Because he had been prudent; because he had taken counsel with his long-headed friends of the world, and had believed them when they said that the horrors of Pandemonium were less horrid than the dismal, muddling torments of a pinched household--because of these things Emily Jerningham’s mind had been embittered, and her fair name sullied. And he could not undo the past. No. Strike Harold Jerningham from the roll of the living to-morrow, and leave those two free to wed, the haughty woman and the world-worn man who should stand side by side before God’s altar, would have little more than their names in common with the lovers who walked arm-in-arm ten years ago in the garden at Passy. “Yes, Emily, my sin is heavier than yours!” he said, presently. “With both, want of faith was the root of evil. If you had trusted in me, if I had trusted in Providence, all would have been different. But it is worse than useless to bewail those old mistakes. Let us make the best of what happiness remains to us. The pleasures of a real friendship, and one of those rarest of all alliances--a friendship between man and woman on terms of intellectual equality.”