"Very well; then I shall be wise--I suppose I shall be--and I'll do it quickly. This fortune of good gold shall propose marriage to me at once, and be accepted--so that I shall be able to look my dear old father in the face again--and then, after I'm married--well, don't blame me for anything that happens."
"I'm sure you'll be happy with him--it's only your silly notions. He's in love with you."
"That makes me hesitate. He really is a man--I like him--see this letter--a long review from the Arcady _Lyre_ of the 'poem' he wrote, a poem consisting of 'Avice Milbrey.' The reviewer has been quite enthusiastic over it, too,--written from some awful place in Montana."
"What more could you ask? He'll be kind."
"You don't understand, Mütterchen. He seems too decent to marry that way--and yet it's the only way I could marry him. And after he found me out--oh, think of what marriage _is_--he'd _have_ to find it out--I couldn't _act_ long--doubtless he wouldn't even be kind to me then."
"But I will do it; I shall; I will be a credit to my training--and I shall learn to hate him and he will have to learn--well, a great deal that he doesn't know about women."
She stared into the fire and added, after a moment's silence:
"Oh, if a man only _could_ live up to the verses he cuts out of magazines!"
History repeats itself so cleverly, with a variance of stage-settings and accessories so cunning, that the repetition seldom bores, and is, indeed, frequently undetected. Thus, the descent of the Barbarians upon a decadent people is a little _tour de force_ that has been performed again and again since the oldest day. But because the assault nowadays is made not with force of arms we are prone to believe it is no longer made at all;--as if human ways had changed a bit since those ugly, hairy tribes from the Northern forests descended upon the Roman empire. And yet the mere difference that the assault is now made with force of money in no way alters the process nor does it permit the result to vary. On the surface all is cordiality and peaceful negotiation. Beneath is the same immemorial strife, the life-and-death struggle,--pitiless, inexorable.
What would have been a hostile bivouac within the city's gates, but for the matter of a few centuries, is now, to select an example which remotely concerns us, a noble structure on Riverside Drive, facing the lordly Hudson and the majestic Palisades that form its farther wall. And, for the horde of Goths and Visigoths, Huns and Vandals, drunkenly reeling in the fitful light of camp-fires, chanting weird battle-runes, fighting for captive vestals, and bickering in uncouth tongues over the golden spoils, what have we now to make the parallel convince? Why, the same Barbarians, actually; the same hairy rudeness, the same unrefined, all-conquering, animal force; a red-faced, big-handed lot, imbued with hearty good nature and an easy tolerance for the ways of those upon whom they have descended.