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

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Why not, I thought, go on dreaming?

Can any wife be prettier than an after-dinner fancy, idle and yet vivid, can paint for you? Can any children make less noise than the little rosy-cheeked ones, who have no existence, except in the omnium gatherum of your own brain? Can any housewife be more unexceptionable than she who goes sweeping daintily the cobwebs that gather in your dreams? Can any domestic larder be better stocked than the private larder of your head dozing on a cushioned chair-back at Delmonico’s? Can any family purse be better filled than the exceeding plump one you dream of after reading such pleasant books as Münchausen or Typee?

But if, after all, it must be—duty, or what-not, making provocation—what then? And I clapped my feet hard against the fire-dogs, and leaned back, and turned my face to the ceiling, as much as to say: And where on earth, then, shall a poor devil look for a wife?

Somebody says, Lyttleton or Shaftesbury, I think, that, “marriages would be happier if they were all arranged by the lord chancellor.” Unfortunately, we have no lord chancellor to make this commutation of our misery.