A thing difficult to get is the thing mostly prized, not the thing that is valuable. Two or three additional Kimberley mines found somewhere among the otherwise uninteresting plains of South Africa would bring down the price of diamonds amazingly. It could hardly have been the beauty, or the wit, or the accomplishments¹ of Clara Demijohn which caused Mr. Tribbledale to triumph so loudly and with so genuine an exultation², telling all Broad Street of his success, when he had succeeded in winning the bride who had once promised herself to Crocker. Were it not that she had all but slipped through his fingers he would never surely have thought her to be worthy³ of such a p?an. Had she come to his first whistle he might have been contented⁴ enough,—as are other ordinary young men with their ordinary young women. He would probably have risen to no enthusiasm of passion. But as things had gone he was as another Paris who had torn a Helen from her Menelaus,—only in this case an honest Paris, with a correct Helen, and from a Menelaus who had not as yet made good his claim. But the subject was worthy of another Iliad, to be followed by another ?neid. By his bow and his spear he had torn her from the arms of a usurping⁵ lover, and now made her all his own. Another man would have fainted and abandoned the contest, when rejected as he had been. But he had continued the fight, even when lying low on the dust of the arena⁶. He had nailed his flag to the mast when all his rigging had been cut away;—and at last he had won the battle. Of course his Clara was doubly dear to him, having been made his own after such difficulties as these.

"I'm not one of those who easily give way in an affair of the heart," he said to Mr. Littlebird, the junior partner in the firm, when he told that gentleman of his engagement.

"So I perceive, Mr. Tribbledale."

"When a man has set his affection on a young lady,—that is, his real affection,—he ought to stick to it,—or die." Mr. Littlebird, who was the happy father of three or four married and marriageable daughters, opened his eyes with surprise. The young men who had come after his young ladies had been pressing enough, but they had not died. "Or die!" repeated Tribbledale. "It is what I should have done. Had she become Mrs. Crocker, I should never again have been seen in the Court,"—"the Court" was the little

分享到：