“I shall never love any man but you,” said Ursula, vehemently. “They’re all alike. No woman ought to marry.”
The pastor smiled, and passed his hand over her smooth head.
“I hope,” he said, “that you will never know a worthless love. A hopeless love, even a dead love, these may ennoble man or woman. But a love of the undeserving can only lure into an _impasse_.”
“No; the Jonker van Helmont is not for such as us, Ursula,” continued the old man. “So much the better. My child, you will marry if God pleases and whom he pleases; but I hope it will be in your own station of life. Not that we must judge any class as such. There is Otto, for instance. _He_ is not a pleasure-seeker. We have seen much of him, my dear, in your absence. He most kindly came to comfort me. He has returned from the Indies as he went, the same pure lover of all that is good. Even in our day the Almighty leads some men untainted through the furnace.” And the simple-hearted pastor launched into praises of his favorite, unwittingly digging pitfalls on paths as yet untrod.
“And as for most men,” he said, “human nature is still much what it was in the days of Thucydides. What says Diodorus, the son of Eucrates, the Athenian? ‘All men are naturally disposed to do wrong; and no law will ever keep them from it.’ And that was the historian’s own view; he repeats it some chapters later. As for women, you remember what he makes Pericles say of _them_. It holds true, in spite of emancipation. ‘Great is the glory of her who is least talked of among the men, either for good or for evil.’ You remember that, Ursula?”
“Yes, indeed, Captain,” said Ursula, into whose whole life this maxim had been constantly woven.
“You might read the history through once more with the greatest advantage. No writer that I know will reveal to you more of the conflict of human passions, excepting, of course, John Bunyan.”
The good pastor did not know many writers. He was not by any means a literary man.
Miss Mopius sailed into the room unannounced, and interrupted their quiet conversation. Two little peculiarities of this lady’s--trifles, light as air--were a source of unending irritation to her brother-in-law. The one was her tacit refusal to prelude her invasions of his sanctum, the other was her persistent drawl of his soldierly name into a sound which was neither French nor English, nor anything but absurd. The Dominé was a brave man; he was exceedingly afraid of his dead wife’s sister, not so much on account of himself as on account of the use to which Diabolus put her in the great siege of the Dominé’s Mansoul.