But, strange though it may appear to you, the more I grew to value at their proper price my cousin’s beauties of mind and heart, the further from her I seemed to be,--nay, I was become so low and mean in my own sight, that that proposition which I had designed to make her, and which I had postponed on my first returning, lest the coldness on’t should shock her sensibilities, seemed now to me so rude and insulting as I might not dare to offend her ears therewith. For, says I to myself, how can I say calmly to such a woman as this, that I have wasted the best part of my life in a passion for that which belonged to another, and that all love is dead in my heart, and yet ask her to share with me my dignity and wealth, out of consideration for an ancient contract that I myself was the first to set aside? Sure ’twere profaneness and sacrilege to speak to a creature like this of marriage without love. Let me rather, says I, try to discover what manner of life, and shared with what person, she should esteem most to her taste, and endeavour to secure it for her, and then live out the remainder of my lonely existence happy in her happiness. But the more I reasoned thus with myself, the more I felt that that ideal or phantasm of wedded life that had presented itself to me at Surat was the only thing that could promise me earthly happiness, and that, without Dorothy were mine, this ideal could never be. And though I chid my foolish heart almost hourly, demanding on’t now how I could be so insensible as not to love a creature of such transcendent excellence, and now how could I expect to love her when love and the power thereof was dead within me, yet my resentiments were never a whit diminished in this way, but rather increased, so that I walked abroad daily in a mighty turmoil and confusion of mind, until that chanced which confirmed the fear that had been aroused in my heart by Mr Sternhold’s words on our first meeting.