his declining years -
if, that is to say, it is not an utter swindle - can you under these
circumstances flatter yourself that you have led a moral life? And this, even
though your wife has been so good a woman that you have not grown tired of her,
and has not fallen into such ill-health as lowers your own health in sympathy;
and though your family has grown up vigorous, amiable and blessed with common
sense. I know many old men and women who are reputed moral, but who are living
with partners whom they have long ceased to love, or who have ugly disagreeable
maiden daughters for whom they have never been able to find husbands - daughters
whom they loathe and by whom they are loathed, in secret, or sons whose folly or
extravagance is a perpetual wear and worry to them. Is it moral for a man to
have brought such things upon himself? Someone should do for morals what that
old Pecksniff Bacon has obtained the credit of having done for science.
    But to return to Mr. and Mrs. Allaby. Mrs. Allaby talked about having
married two of her daughters, as though it had been the easiest thing in the
world; she talked in this way because she heard other mothers do so, but in her
heart of hearts she did not know how she had done it, nor, indeed, if it had
been her doing at all. First there had been a young man, in connection with whom
she had tried to practise certain manoeuvres which she had rehearsed in
imagination over and over again, but which she found impossible to apply in
practice; then there had been weeks of a wurra-wurra of hopes and fears and
little stratagems which as often as not proved injudicious, and then somehow or
another in the end there lay the young man bound and with an arrow through his
heart at her daughter's feet. It seemed to her to be all a fluke, which she
could have little or no hope of repeating. She had indeed repeated it once, and
might perhaps with great luck repeat it yet once again - but five times over -
it was awful: why she would rather have three confinements than go through the
wear and tear of marrying a single daughter.
    Nevertheless it had got to be done, and poor Mrs. Allaby never looked at a
young man without an eye to his being a future son-in-law. Papas and mammas
sometimes ask young men whether their intentions are honourable towards their
daughters; I think young men might occasionally ask papas and mammas whether
their intentions are honourable, before