If he was idle before he will be idle still; and he probably does in some sort make a calculation and strike a balance between his means and the proposed additional burden of a wife and children.

But she, knowing nothing, takes a monstrous leap in the dark, in which everything is to be changed, and in which everything is trusted to chance.

Miss Palliser, however, differing in this from the majority of her friends and acquaintances, frightened, perhaps by those representations of her sister to which she would not altogether yield, had paused, and was still pausing.

"Where should we go and live if I did marry him ?" she said to Lady Chiltern.
"I suppose he has an opinion of his own on that subject ?" "Not in the least, I should think." "Has he never said anything about it ?" "Oh dear no.

Matters have not got so far as that at all;--nor would they ever, out of his own head.