_It means that you are spoiled for anything
but comfort in this life_.
For a few weeks you might believe yourself in a fairy-land of romance
if you married your lover and went to live in the two rooms. But at the
end of that period you would begin to realize that you were in a very
actual land of poverty and discomfort.
Discomfort is relative. Those rooms to the shop-girl who had toiled for
years, and lived in a fourth-flight-back tenement, would represent
luxury. To you, after a few months, they would mean absolute penury.
You would begin to miss your beautiful home, and your maids, and your
carriages. Your husband would know you were missing them, and he would
be miserable. Unless your father came to your rescue, your dream of
romantic love would end in a nightmare of regret and sorrow.
Your father knows you,--the creature of refined tastes and luxurious
habits that he has made you,--and your lover does not. Neither do you
know yourself.
It requires a woman in ten thousand, one possessed of absolute heroism,
like the old martyrs who sang at the stake while dying, to do what you
contemplate, and to be happy in the doing.
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