But the difficulty remains--one has to choose.

For though I have no wish to be Queen of England or only for a moment--I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister's gossip; the countess whisper, and share her memories of halls and gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after all their secret code; or why so impermeable?
And then, doffing one's own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment some one's--any one's--to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherd pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts.

But no--we must choose.

Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker in his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the Manor.
A young man with a Wellington nose, who had occupied a seven-and-sixpenny seat, made his way down the stone stairs when the opera ended, as if he were still set a little apart from his fellows by the influence of the music.
At midnight Jacob Flanders heard a rap on his door.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed.

"You're the very man I want!" and without more ado they discovered the lines which he had been seeking all day; only they come not in Virgil, but in Lucretius.
"Yes; that should make him sit up," said Bonamy, as Jacob stopped reading.