His Aunt Stanbury had not read his character altogether wrongly, as he thought, when she had once declared that decency and godliness were both distasteful to him.
Would it not be destruction to such a one as he was, to fall into an interminable engagement with any girl, let her be ever so sweet?
But yet, he felt as he sat there, filling pipe after pipe, smoking away till past midnight, that though he could not bear the idea of trammels, though he was totally unfit for matrimony, either present or in prospect,--he felt that he had within his breast a double identity, and that that other division of himself would be utterly crushed if it were driven to divest itself of the idea of love.
Whence was to come his poetry, the romance of his life, the springs of clear water in which his ignoble thoughts were to be dipped till they should become pure, if love was to be banished altogether from the list of delights that were possible to him?
And then he began to speculate on love,--that love of which poets wrote, and of which he found that some sparkle was necessary to give light to his life.
Was it not the one particle of divine breath given to man, of which he had heard since he was a boy?
And how was this love to be come at, and was it to be a thing of reality, or merely an idea?
Was it a pleasure to be attained, or a mystery that charmed by the difficulties of the distance,--a distance that never could be so passed that the thing should really be reached?
Was love to be ever a delight, vague as is that feeling of unattainable beauty which far-off mountains give, when you know that you can never place yourself amidst their unseen valleys?
And if love could be reached,--the love of which the poets sing, and of which his own heart was ever singing,--what were to be its pleasures?
To press a hand, to kiss a lip, to clasp a waist, to hear even the low voice of the vanquished, confessing loved one as she hides her blushing cheek upon your shoulder,--what is it all but to have reached the once mysterious valley of your far-off mountain, and to have found that it is as other valleys,--rocks and stones, with a little grass, and a thin stream of running water?
But beyond that pressure of the hand, and that kissing of the lips,--beyond that short-lived pressure of the plumage which is common to birds and men,--what could love do beyond that?
There were children with dirty faces, and household bills, and a wife who must, perhaps, always darn the stockings,--and be sometimes cross.

Was love to lead only to this,--a dull life, with a woman who had lost the beauty from her cheeks, and the gloss from her hair, and the music from her voice, and the fire from her eye, and the grace from her step, and whose waist an arm should no longer be able to span?
Did the love of the poets lead to that, and that only?
Then, through the cloud of smoke, there came upon him some dim idea of self-abnegation,--that the mysterious valley among the mountains, the far-off prospect of which was so charming to him,--which made the poetry of his life, was, in fact, the capacity of caring more for other human beings than for himself.

The beauty of it all was not so much in the thing loved as in the loving.

"Were she a cripple, hunchbacked, eyeless," he said to himself, "it might be the same.

Only she must be a woman." Then he blew off a great cloud of smoke, and went into bed lost amidst poetry, philosophy, love, and tobacco.
It had been arranged over-night that he was to start the next morning at half-past seven, and Priscilla had promised to give him his breakfast before he went.