What wonder, then, that his
imagination should fail to realise the changes that eight years must
have worked? He knew too much against himself, and was too bankrupt in
love to be squeamish; if Ellen had been only what he thought her,
and if his prospects had been in reality no better than he believed
they were, I do not know that there is anything much more imprudent in
what Ernest proposed than there is in half the marriages that take
place every day.
There was nothing for it, however, but to make the best of the
inevitable, so I wished my young friend good fortune, and told him
he could have whatever money he wanted to start his shop with, if what
he had in hand was not sufficient. He thanked me, asked me to be
kind enough to let him do all my mending and repairing, and to get him
any other like orders that I could, and left me to my own reflections.
I was even more angry when he was gone than I had been while he
was with me. His frank, boyish face had beamed with a happiness that
had rarely visited it. Except at Cambridge he had hardly known what
happiness meant, and even there his life had been clouded as of a
man for whom wisdom at the greatest of its entrances was quite shut
out.
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