shade; but beware lest you have to tear it up one day or other; for
then--What then? Why, you will find your whole life plucked away with
its roots!"

Sir Sedley said these last words with so serious an emphasis that I was
startled from the confusion I had felt at the former part of his
address. He paused long, tapped his snuff-box, inhaled a pinch slowly,
and continued, with his more accustomed sprightliness,--

"Go as much as you can into the world. Again I say, 'Enjoy yourself.'
And again I ask, what is all this labor to do for you? On some men, far
less eminent than Trevanion, it would impose a duty to aid you in a
practical career, to secure you a public employment; not so on him. He
would not mortgage an inch of his independence by asking a favor from a
minister. He so thinks occupation the delight of life that he occupies
you out of pure affection. He does not trouble his head about your
future. He supposes your father will provide for that, and does not
consider that meanwhile your work leads to nothing! Think over all
this. I have now bored you enough."

I was bewildered; I was dumb. These practical men of the world, how
they take us by surprise! Here had I come to sound Sir Sedley, and here
was I plumbed, gauged, measured, turned inside out, without having got
an inch beyond the sur face of that smiling, debonnaire, unruffled ease.
Yet, with his invariable delicacy, in spite of all this horrible
frankness, Sir Sedley had not said a word to wound what he might think
the more sensitive part of my amour propre,--not a word as to the
inadequacy of my pretensions to think seriously of Fanny Trevanion. Had
we been the Celadon and Chloe of a country village, he could not have
regarded us as more equal, so far as the world went. And for the rest,