It may be that the fascinations of this young lady had something to do with Harrington’s failure to pass his Divinity examination, and with his subsequent renunciation of the Church of England for the wider faith of the naturalist and the metaphysician. He told his family that he had got beyond Christianity as it was understood by Churchmen, and set forth in the Thirty-nine Articles. He had gone from the river to the sea, as he explained it, from the narrow banked-in river of orthodoxy to the wide ocean of the new faith—faith in humanity—faith in a universal brotherhood—faith in one’s self as superior to anything else in the universe, past or present. In this enlightened attitude he had grasped at Theodore’s offer,—all the more eagerly, perhaps, because he had lately heard Juliet Baldwin’s emphatic declaration apropos to nothing particular—that she would never marry a parson, and that the existence of a parson’s wife in town or country seemed to her of all lives the most odious. Would she take more kindly to a lawyer, he asked himself with a sinking heart. Would a country practice, life in an old-fashioned house in an old-fashioned market-town, satisfy her ambition? He feared not. If he wanted that radiant creature for his wife, he must exchange country for town, Dorchester for Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and a house in Chester Street, or at least Gloucester Place. She had been used to Belgravia; but she might perhaps tolerate the neighbourhood of Portman Square, the unaristocratic sound of Baker Street, the convenience of Atlas omnibuses, until he should be able to start his brougham. Led on by this guiding star he told himself that what he had to do was to become learned in the law, particularly in the science, art, and mystery of conveyancing, which branch of a family practice he believed to be at once dignified and lucrative. He had to make himself master of his profession, to make his experiments upon the inferior clay of Dorsetshire—upon farmers and small gentry,—and then to persuade his father to buy him a London practice, an aristocratic London practice, such as should not call a blush to the cheek of a fashionable wife. He had met solicitors’ wives who gave themselves all the airs of great ladies, and who talked as if the Bench and the Bar were set in motion and kept going by their husbands. Such a wife would Juliet be could he be so blessed as to win her.