The fact is, the secure one has brought every appliance of life to such an absolute exactitude and perfection, that, having no longer any thing to give him pain, he becomes quite wretched. Secureness, it is evident, may go too far. We may become actually frightened in this world at our own caution. We may be shocked by the very unimpeachability of our own virtue. We may become miserable through the extremity of our happiness. In the same manner the secure one, when he has “got all things right,” as he would say, finds himself, to his great disappointment, just at the threshold of woe and evil. He has exactly got time to set his house in order, before the proper consequence of such an event befalls him; and he expires at the very moment when he has just completed his preparations to live. There is another order of secure ones, whose carefulness refers rather to their wealth than their health. There is an awful inviolability of pocket about such men—a provoking guardedness against all the possible appeals of friendship, and all the impulses of benevolence. Such men look as if they were all stanchioned over. _La Pucelle_ itself was not more perfectly fortified than their breeches. A poorer man is apt to feel in their presence as if he were under an indictment for an intention either to beg or borrow, or, perhaps, to steal from them. He sees something criminative against himself in every impregnable-looking button. Secure ones of this class, perhaps, are bachelors under forty—careful, circumspect men, that have passed through the ordeal of a thousand evening parties without ever being in the least danger. They abstain from marrying, from very fear lest any advantage should be got of them. They cannot enter into the slightest intercourse with a young lady, without letting it appear that they are perfectly on their guard. The most undesigning girl, like the above poor man, feels in their presence as if she were liable to be construed into an absolute “drapery miss.” He is always quite civil, but that is from his very _secureness_: he knows he is in no danger. An experienced woman gives up a man of this kind at first sight. She sees he is cook’s meat, _i. e._ that he is to marry a middle-aged kitchen woman at fifty, upon the ground of her proficiency in preparing a beef-steak. The general feeling of the sex regarding this sort of secure one is, “Confound the fellow! does he think that any one cares for him, or would take him though he were willing?” “Nobody wants you, Sir, she said.”