in Richard Hardie's house--disunion, a fast-growing plant, when men set
it in the soil of the passions.

Alfred, unlike Julia, had no panacea. Had any lips, except perhaps hers,
told him that "to be good is to be happy here below," he would have
replied: _"Negatur;_ contradicted by daily experience." It never occurred
to him, therefore, to go out of himself, and sympathise with the sordid
sorrows of the poor, and their bottomless egotism in contact with the
well-to-do. He brooded on his own love, and his own unhappiness, and his
own father's cruelty. His nights were sleepless and his days leaden. He
tried hard to read for his first class, but for once even ambition
failed: it ended in flinging books away in despair. He wandered about
dreaming and moping for some change, and bitterly regretting his
excessive delicacy, which had tied his own hands and brought him to a
stand-still. He lost his colour and what little flesh he had to lose; for
such young spirits as this are never plump. In a word, being now
strait-jacketed into feminine inactivity, while void of feminine
patience, his ardent heart was pining and fretting itself out. He was in
this condition, when one day Peterson, his Oxonian friend, burst in on
him open-mouthed with delight, and, as usual with bright spirits of this
calibre, did not even notice his friend's sadness. "Cupid had clapped him
on the shoulder," as Shakespeare hath it; and it was a deal nicer than
the bum-bailiff rheumatism.

"Oh, such a divine creature! Met her twice; you know her by sight; her
name is Dodd. But I don't care; it shall be Peterson; the rose by any
other name, &c." Then followed a rapturous description of the lady's
person, well worth omitting. "And such a jolly girl! brightens them all
up wherever she goes; and such a dancer; did the cachouka with a little
Spanish bloke Bosanquet has got hold of, and made his black bolus eyes