This was so true that Montague did not know how to deny it.  Nor was he sure that it would be well that he should deny it.  The time must come, and why not now as well as at any future moment?  He had to make her understand that he could not join his lot with her,—­chiefly indeed because his heart was elsewhere, a reason on which he could hardly insist because she could allege that she had a prior right to his heart;—­but also because her antecedents had been such as to cause all his friends to warn him against such a marriage.  So he plucked up courage for the battle.  ‘It was nearly that,’ he said.

There are many—­and probably the greater portion of my readers will be among the...