CHAPTER XXXII 470
is an asp in the garland: the wine has a bitter taste: her promises are hollow-- her offers false: I see and know all this."
I gazed at him in wonder.
" It is strange," pursued he, " that while I love Rosamond Oliver so wildly-- with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion, the object of which is exquisitely beautiful, graceful, fascinating-- I experience at the same time a calm, unwarped consciousness that she would not make me a good wife; that she is not the partner suited to me; that I should discover this within a year after marriage; and that to twelve months ' rapture would succeed a lifetime of regret. This I know."
" Strange indeed!" I could not help ejaculating.
" While something in me," he went on, " is acutely sensible to her charms, something else is as deeply impressed with her defects: they are such that she could sympathise in nothing I aspired to-- co- operate in nothing I undertook. Rosamond a sufferer, a labourer, a female apostle? Rosamond a missionary ' s wife? No!"
" But you need not be a missionary. You might relinquish that scheme."
" Relinquish! What! my vocation? My great work? My foundation laid on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race-- of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance-- of substituting peace for war-- freedom for bondage-- religion for superstition-- the hope of heaven for the fear of hell? Must I relinquish that? It is dearer than the blood in my veins. It is what I have to look forward to, and to live for."
After a considerable pause, I said-- " And Miss Oliver? Are her disappointment and sorrow of no interest to you?"
" Miss Oliver is ever surrounded by suitors and flatterers: in less than a month, my image will be effaced from her heart. She will forget me; and