nor shrubs affect to be forest trees; the limestone
and granite never pretend that they are
porphyry and onyx. Nature is real, and why
should man alone be untruthful and unreal? If
I liked these reflections, and tried to lose myself
in them, it was in the hope of shutting out
others less gratifying; but, do what I would,
there before me arose the image of Catinka, as
she stood at the edge of the rivulet, that stream
which seemed to cut me off from one portion of
my life, and make the past the irrevocably gone
for ever.

I am certain I was quite right in parting
with that girl. Any respectable man, a father
of a family, would have applauded me for
severing this dangerous connexion. What could
come of such association except unhappiness?
"Potts," would the biographer say— "Potts
saw the unerring instinct of his quick
perception, that this young creature would one day
or other have laid at his feet the burnt-offering
of her heart, and then, what could he have done?
If Potts had been less endowed with genius, or
less armed in honesty, he had not anticipated
this peril, or, foreseeing, had undervalued it.
But he both saw and feared it. How very
differently had a libertine reasoned out this
situation!" And then I thought how wicked I might
have been; a monster of crime and atrocity.
Every one knows the sensation of lying snugly
a-bed on a stormy night, and, as the rain plashes
and the wind howls, drawing more closely around
him the coverlet, and the selfish satisfaction of
his own comfort, heightened by all the possible
hardships of others outside. In the same
benevolent spirit, but not by any means so
reprehensible, is it pleasant to imagine oneself a great
criminal, standing in the dock, to be stared at
by a horror-struck public, photographed, shaved,
prison costumed, exhorted, sentenced, and then,
just as the last hammer has driven the last nail
into the scaffold, and the great bell has tolled
out, to find that you are sitting by your wood
fire, with your curtains drawn, your uncut
volume beside you, and your peculiar weakness,
be it tea, or sherry-cobbler, at your elbow. I
constantly take a "rise" out of myself in this
fashion, and rarely a week goes over that I have
not either poisoned a sister or had a shot at the
Queen. It is a sort of intellectual Russian bath,
in which the luxury consists in the exaggerated
alternative between being scalded first and rolled
in the snow afterwards. It was in this figurative
snow I was now disporting myself, pleasantly
and refreshingly, and yet remorse, like a
sturdy dun, stood at my gate, and refused to go
away.

Had I, indeed, treated her harshly? had I
rejected the offer of her young and innocent heart?
Very puzzling and embarrassing question this,
and especially to a man who had nothing of the
coxcomb in his nature, none of that prompting
of self-love that would suggest a vain reply. I
felt that it was very natural she should have
been struck by the attractive features of my
character but I felt this without a particle of
conceit. I even experienced a sense of sorrow
as I thought over it, just as a conscientious
syren might have regretted that Nature had
endowed her with such a charming voice; and this
duty— for it was a duty— discharged, I bethought
me of my own future. I had a mission, which
was to see Kate Herbert and give her Miss
Crofton's letter. In doing so, I must needs
throw off all disguises and mockeries, and be
Potts, the very creature she sneered at, the man
whose mere name was enough to suggest a vulgar
life and a snob's nature! No matter what misery
it may give, I will do it manfully. She may
never appreciate— the world at large may never
appreciate— what noble motives were hidden
beneath these assumed natures, mere costumes
as they were to impart more vigour and
persuasiveness to sentiments which, uttered in the
undress of Potts, would have carried no convictions
with them. Play Macbeth in a paletot,
perform Othello in "pegtops," and see what effect
you will produce! Well, my pretended station
and rank were the mere gaudes and properties
that gave force to my opinions. And now to
relinquish these, and be the actor, in the garish
light of the noonday, and a shabby-genteel coat
and hat! "I will do it," muttered I, "I will
do it, but the suffering will be intense!" When
the prisoner sentenced to a long captivity is no
more addressed by his name, but simply called
No. 18, or 43, it is said that the shock seems
to kill the sense of identity within him, and that
nothing more tends to that stolid air of
indifference, that hopeless inactivity of feature, so
characteristic of a prison life; in the very same
way am I affected when limited to my Potts
nature, and condemned to confine myself within
the narrow bounds of that one small identity.
From what Prince Max had said at the table
d'hôte at Bregenz, it was clear that Mrs. Keats
had already learned I was not the young prince
of the House of Orleans; but, in being disabused
of one error, she seemed to have fallen into
another, and it behoved me to explain that I
was not a rope-dancer or a mountebank. "She
too shall know me in my Potts nature," said I;
"she also shall recognise me in the 'majesty of
myself.'" I was not very sure of what that
was, but I found it in Hegel.

And when I have completed this task, I will
throw myself like a waif upon the waters of life.
I will be that which the moment or the event
shall make me— neither trammelled by the past
nor awed by the future. I will take the world as
the drama of a day. Were men to do this, what
breadth and generosity would it impart to them!
It is in self-seeking and advancement that we
narrow our faculties and imprison our natures.
A man fancies he owns a palace and a demesne,
but it is the palace that owns him, obliges him
to maintain a certain state, live in a certain
style, surrounded with certain observances, not
one of which may be perhaps native to him. It
is the poor man, who comes to visit and gaze on
his splendours, who really enjoys them; he sees
them without one detracting influence— not to
say that in his heart are no corroding jealousies
of some other rich mail, who has a finer Claude,