How he worked only those who knew him can
tell, for no four men of merely ordinary power could have achieved
such bewildering success as he did. But a man who is on the downward
slope of life cannot fare like the lamented Proctor; he must endure
the pangs of neglect, until death comes and relieves him of the dire
torture of being down.
And the harmless widows who are suddenly robbed of their protector.
Ah, how some of them are made to suffer! Little Amelia Sedley, in
"Vanity Fair," has her sufferings and indignities painted by a
master-hand, and there is not a line thickened or darkened overmuch.
The miserable tale of the cheap lodgings, and the insults which the
poor girl had flung at her because, in the passion of her love, she
spent trifling sums on her boy--how actual it all seems! The widow who
may have held her head high in her days of prosperity, soon receives
lessons from women: they call it teaching her what is her proper
place. Those good and discreet ladies have a notion that their conduct
is full of propriety and discretion and sound sense; but how they make
their sisters suffer--ah, how they make the poor things suffer! I
believe that, if any improvident man could see, in a keenly vivid
dream, a vision of his wife's future after his death, he would stint
himself of anything rather than run the risk of having to reflect on
his death-bed that he had failed to do his best for those who loved
him.
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