Blessed was this neighbourhood, to have no railway, out-shrieking the sea-gulls, out-reeking the whale, and even out-roaring the sea in a storm! The station was so far away, that good sound people let their journeys depend very much upon the weather; which is the proper thing for them to do. And after the abominable rush of London--which never should make any fuss about smells, that it never has time to blow its nose at--there came into my heart such a quietude of comfort, that I begged the groom, who was sent to fetch me--Sir Roland being absent at a county meeting--to drive as slowly as the horse would go. For several years now, I had been as happy as anybody ought to wish to be. I had plenty of money, (through my father's labour, and my mother's liberality) to keep myself, and to help a friend, without wasting any upon that third desirable object (in Solon's opinion) the punishment of an enemy. I was blest with plenty of friends, but cursed as yet with no single enemy; and though many of my friends were poor, they had too much pride to sponge on me, beyond the mere fringe of a Turkish towel. I had liked a great number of girls, here and there, in a strictly moral and moveable way, so as never to get any heart-ache about them, any more than they got it about me. And as for Polly Windsor, who had seemed to be marked out, by the finger of commerce, as my bride, she had certainly shown herself kind and obliging, after we moved into our new house, and had helped my dear mother to spend much cash, in adorning it with hideous devices. But, as soon as Bill Chumps came back from Oxford, with his double-first, and his six feet two, to read for the Bar at Lincoln's Inn, she became too personal--and I might say bodily--in her sentiments, to suit my taste. "Do you mean to grow any more, Tommy?" she had asked, as if love were a question of inches; "why Mr. Chumps must be a foot more than you are; though you have got your heels three inches high." "On account of the curve of my foot," I answered; and she knew what I meant, though too delicate to say it; for her feet were like a pair of soles, without any right and left to them. And this made another little breach between us.