Complete Project Gutenberg Works of George Meredith eBook

By this time all specially concerned in the System knew it.  The honeymoon was shoring placidly above them.  Is not happiness like another circulating medium?  When we have a very great deal of it, some poor hearts are aching for what is taken away from them.  When we have gone out and seized it on the highways, certain inscrutable laws are sure to be at work to bring us to the criminal bar, sooner or later.  Who knows the honeymoon that did not steal somebody’s sweetness?  Richard Turpin went forth, singing “Money or life” to the world:  Richard Feverel has done the same, substituting “Happiness” for “Money,” frequently synonyms.  The coin he wanted he would have, and was just as much a highway robber as his fellow Dick, so that those who have failed to recognize him as a hero before, may now regard him in that light.  Meanwhile the world he has squeezed looks exceedingly patient and beautiful.  His coin chinks delicious music to him.  Nature and the order of things on earth have no warmer admirer than a jolly brigand or a young man made happy by the Jews.

CHAPTER XXXIII

And now the author of the System was on trial under the eyes of the lady who loved him.  What so kind as they?  Yet are they very rigorous, those soft watchful woman’s eyes.  If you are below the measure they have made of you, you will feel it in the fulness of time.  She cannot but show you that she took you for a giant, and has had to come down a bit.  You feel yourself strangely diminishing in those sweet mirrors, till at last they drop on you complacently level.  But, oh beware, vain man, of ever waxing enamoured of that wonderful elongation of a male creature you saw reflected in her adoring upcast orbs!  Beware of assisting to delude her!  A woman who is not quite a fool will forgive your being but a man, if you are surely that:  she will haply learn to acknowledge that no mortal tailor could have fitted that figure she made of you respectably, and that practically (though she sighs to think it) her ideal of you was on the pattern of an overgrown charity-boy in the regulation jacket and breech.  For this she first scorns the narrow capacities of the tailor, and then smiles at herself.  But shouldst thou, when the hour says plainly, Be thyself, and the woman is willing to take thee as thou art, shouldst thou still aspire to be that thing of shanks and wrests, wilt thou not seem contemptible as well as ridiculous?  And when the fall comes, will it not be flat on thy face, instead of to the common height of men?  You may fall miles below her measure of you, and be safe:  nothing is damaged save an overgrown charity-boy; but if you fall below the common height of men, you must make up your mind to see her rustle her gown, spy at the looking-glass, and transfer her allegiance.  The moral of which is, that if we pretend to be what we are not, woman, for whose amusement the farce is performed, will find us out and punish us for it.  And it is usually the end of a sentimental dalliance.