“_November 30th._--More blanks in my journal. I said we were growing alarmingly intimate; such an intimacy is alarming to a fellow who came to Coltonslough bent on devoting himself to Aristotle and Aristophanes, Æschylus and Euripides, and all that sort of people. Have been reading ‘The Clouds’ all this morning, but found a strange undercurrent of Susan Turner pervading that classic satire; and I mean to go in and win this time: those fellows at St. Boniface sha’n’t be able to laugh at my discomfiture a second time. Why were women created for the trouble and confusion of the superior sex? I thought I should be so safe at Coltonslough, remote from Rosa, the Delilah of my youth; and lo! here is another Delilah, a thousand times more dangerous--a shy, brown-eyed Omphale, for whose sake any intellectual Hercules on this earth would meekly hold the distaff. She is _so_ pretty; and all those modest, shrinking ways have such an unspeakable fascination after a long course of Rosa’s sharp repartees, all redolent of the bar and the beer-engines. I can never dissociate Rosa from the smell of malt liquors and ardent spirits, with just a faint suspicion of lemons and stale pork-pie. But there must be something extraordinary about _this_ girl, for her vulgar surroundings do not seem to vulgarize her. I don’t mean that she is one of nature’s duchesses, or any humbug of that sort. I have no belief in nature’s nobility, and to my mind a duchess is a person who has been cradled in Belgravia, whose long-clothes were flounced with _point d’Alençon_, and to whom the wrong side of Temple Bar would be as strange as the centre of Africa. I should by no means care to see my little Susy in a London drawing-room; but I can fancy her domiciled in some rustic cottage in the lake district, a patient Wordsworthian little handmaiden, waiting upon and worshipping her husband, and getting him cosy breakfasts, with silvery trout broiled to perfection, and mushrooms newly-gathered from the neighbouring plains. If I were only an embryo curate, with neither expectations nor ambitious desires, I scarcely think that I could find a better wife than this simple gazelle-eyed maiden; but---- Oh, that terrible monosyllable! The history of all the world seems made up of buts and ifs.