I do not think that Wollaston cared much for me personally. He was a curious compound, materialistic yet impulsive, and for ever drawn to some new thing; without any love for anybody particularly, as far as I could see, and yet with much more general kindness and philanthropy than many a man possessing much stronger sympathies and antipathies. There was no holy of holies in him, into which one or two of the elect could occasionally be admitted and feel God to be there. He was no temple, but rather a comfortable, hospitable house open to all friends, well furnished with books and pictures, and free to every guest from garret to cellar. He had “liberal” notions about the relationship between the sexes. Not that he was a libertine, but he disbelieved in marriage, excepting for so long as husband and wife are a necessity to one another. If one should find the other uninteresting, or somebody else more interesting, he thought there ought to be a separation. All this I soon learned from him, for he was communicative without any reserve. His treatment of his niece was peculiar. He would talk on all kinds of subjects before her, for he had a theory that she ought to receive precisely the same social training as men, and should know just what men knew. He was never coarse, but on the other hand he would say things to her in my presence which brought a flame into my face. What the evil consequences of this might be, I could not at once foresee, but one good result obviously was, that in his house there was nothing of that execrable practice of talking down to women; there was no change of level when women were present. One day he began to speak about a novel which everybody was reading then, and I happened to say that I wished people who wrote novels would not write as if love were the very centre and sum of human existence. A man’s life was made up of so much besides love, and yet novelists were never weary of repeating the same story, telling it over and over again in a hundred different forms.