Grateful you may be; sufficiently grateful, never; it would be impossible.

No gratitude could be commensurate with the benefit I conferred upon you.

Yet if you had married, and discovered for yourself the troubles that come from too close an association with that sex which some wag of old ironically called the weaker, and of which contemporary fools with no sense of irony continue so to speak in good faith, you could have blamed only yourself.

You would have shrugged your shoulders and made the best of it, realizing that no other man had put this wrong upon you.

But with me--thousand devils!--it is very different.