"Ay, ay, she has been my ruin! and if I were one of your weak fools who make a gospel of the silliest and most mawkish follies of this social state, she would now be my disgrace; but instead of my disgrace, I will make her my footstool to honour and wealth. And, then, to the devil with the footstool! Yes! two years I have borne what was enough to turn my whole blood into gall,--inactivity, hopelessness, a wasted heart and life in myself; contumely from the world; coldness, bickering, ingratitude from the one for whom (oh, ass that I was!) I gave up the most cherished part of my nature,--rather, my nature itself! Two years I have borne this, and now will I have my revenge. I will sell her,--sell her! God! I will sell her like the commonest beast of a market! And this paltry piece of false coin shall buy me--my world! Other men's vengeance comes from hatred,--a base, rash, unphilosophical sentiment! mine comes from scorn,--the only wise state for the reason to rest in. Other men's vengeance ruins themselves; mine shall save me! Ha! how my soul chuckles when I look at this pitiful pair, who think I see them not, and know that every movement they make is on a mesh of my web! Yet," and Welford paused slowly,--"yet I cannot but mock myself when I think of the arch gull that this boy's madness, love,--love, indeed! the very word turns me sick with loathing,--made of me. Had that woman, silly, weak, automatal as she is, really loved me; had she been sensible of the unspeakable sacrifice I had made to her (Antony's was nothing to it,--he lost a real world only; mine was the world of imagination); had she but condescended to learn my nature, to subdue the woman's devil at her own,--I could have lived on in this babbling hermitage forever, and fancied myself happy and resigned,--I could have become a different being. I fancy I could have become what your moralists (quacks!) call 'good.' But this fretting frivolity of heart, this lust of fool's praise, this peevishness of temper, this sullenness in answer to the moody thought, which in me she neither fathomed nor forgave, this vulgar, daily, hourly pining at the paltry pinches of the body's poverty, the domestic whine, the household complaint,--when I--I have not a thought for such pitiful trials of affection; and all this while my curses, my buried hope and disguised spirit and sunken name not thought of; the magnitude of my surrender to her not even comprehended; nay, her 'inconveniences'--a dim hearth, I suppose, or a daintiless table--compared, ay, absolutely compared, with all which I abandoned for her sake! As if it were not enough,--had I been a fool, an ambitionless, soulless fool,-the mere thought that I had linked my name to that of a tradesman,--I beg pardon, a retired tradesman!--as if that knowledge--a knowledge I would strangle my whole race, every one who has ever met, seen me, rather than they should penetrate--were not enough, when she talks of 'comparing,' to make me