CHAPTER XII.
DOUBTS.
I believe there is no period of life so happy as that in which a thriving lover leaves his mistress after his first success.

His joy is more perfect then than at the absolute moment of his own eager vow, and her half-assenting blushes.

Then he is thinking mostly of her, and is to a certain degree embarrassed by the effort necessary for success.

But when the promise has once been given to him, and he is able to escape into the domain of his own heart, he is as a conqueror who has mastered half a continent by his own strategy.
It never occurs to him, he hardly believes, that his success is no more than that which is the ordinary lot of mortal man.

He never reflects that all the old married fogies whom he knows and despises, have just as much ground for pride, if such pride were enduring; that every fat, silent, dull, somnolent old lady whom he sees and quizzes, has at some period been deemed as worthy a prize as his priceless galleon; and so deemed by as bold a captor as himself.
Some one has said that every young mother, when her first child is born, regards the babe as the most wonderful production of that description which the world has yet seen.