Читать книгу Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart онлайн

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He was too angry to reply; but eighteen months thereafter I got a thick, three-sheeted letter, with a dove upon the seal, telling me that he was as happy as a king: he said he had married a good-hearted, domestic, loving wife, who was as lovely as a June day, and that their baby, not three months old, was as bright as a spot of June day sunshine on the grass.

—What a tender, delicate, loving wife—mused I—such flashing, flaming flirt must in the end make; the prostitute of fashion; the bauble of fifty hearts idle as hers; the shifting make-piece of a stage scene; the actress, now in peasant, and now in princely petticoats! How it would cheer an honest soul to call her—his! What a culmination of his heart-life; what a rich dreamland to be realized!

—Bah! and I thrust the poker into the clotted mass of fading coal—just such, and so worthless is the used heart of a city flirt; just so the incessant sparkle of her life, and frittering passions, fuses all that is sound and combustible into black, sooty, shapeless residuum.