In this mood you fall in with Dalton, who has just returned from a year passed in the French capital. There is an easy suavity and graceful indifference in his manner that chimes admirably with your humor. He is gracious, without needing to be kind. He is a friend, without any challenge or proffer of sincerity. He is just one of those adepts in world tactics which match him with all men, but which link him to none. He has made it his art to be desired and admired, but rarely to be trusted. You could not have a better teacher! Under such instruction you become disgusted for the time with any effort, or pulse of affection, which does not have immediate and practical bearing upon that success in life by which you measure your hopes. The dreams of love, of romantic adventure, of placid joy, have all gone out with the fantastic images to which your passionate youth had joined them. The world is now regarded as a tournament, where the gladiatorship of life is to be exhibited at your best endeavor. Its honors and joys lie in a brilliant pennon and a plaudit. Dalton is learned in those arts which make of action, not a duty, but a conquest; and sense of duty has expired in you with those romantic hopes to which you bound it, not as much through sympathy as ignorance. It is a cold and a bitterly selfish work that lies before you,--to be covered over with such borrowed show of smiles as men call affability. The heart wears a stout, brazen screen; its inclinations grow to the habit of your ambitious projects. In such mood come swift dreams of wealth,--not of mere accumulation, but of the splendor and parade which in our Western world are, alas! its chiefest attractions. You grow observant of markets, and estimate percentages. You fondle some speculation in your thought, until it grows into a gigantic scheme of profit; and if the venture prove successful, you follow the tide tremulously, until some sudden reverse throws you back upon the resources of your professional employ. But again as you see this and that one wearing the blazonry which wealth wins, and which the man of the world is sure to covet,--your weak soul glows again with the impassioned desire, and you hunger, with brute appetite and bestial eye, for riches. You see the mania around you, and it is relieved of odium by the community of error. You consult some gray old veteran in the war of gold, scarred with wounds, and crowned with honors, and watch eagerly for the words and the ways which have won him wealth. Your fingers tingle with mad expectancies; your eyes roam, lost in estimates. Your note-book shows long lines of figures. Your reading of the news centres in the stock-list. Your brow grows cramped with the fever of anxiety. Through whole church-hours your dreams range over the shadowy transactions of the week or the month to come.