But, as he had always piqued himself upon being able to put on one side
all superficial worldliness in his chase after power, it did not do for
him to shrink from seeing and facing the incompleteness of moderate
means. Only marriage upon moderate means was gradually becoming more
distasteful to him.
Nor did his subsequent intercourse with Lord Bolton, the Cabinet minister
before mentioned, tend to reconcile him to early matrimony. At Lord
Bolton's house he met polished and intellectual society, and all that
smoothness in ministering to the lower wants in eating and drinking which
seems to provide that the right thing shall always be at the right place
at the right time, so that the want of it shall never impede for an
instant the feast of wit or reason; while, if he went to the houses of
his friends, men of the same college and standing as himself, who had
been seduced into early marriages, he was uncomfortably aware of numerous
inconsistencies and hitches in their _menages_. Besides, the idea of the
possible disgrace that might befall the family with which he thought of
allying himself haunted him with the tenacity and also with the
exaggeration of a nightmare, whenever he had overworked himself in his
search after available and profitable knowledge, or had a fit of
indigestion after the exquisite dinners he was learning so well to
appreciate.
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