Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/178

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170
"BONES AND I."

indispensable minimum of another, must allow for friction in velocity, must calculate the windage of a shot. In ethics we must accept fanaticism with sincerity, exaggeration with enthusiasm, over-caution, with unusual foresight, and a giddy brain with a warm, impulsive heart. What we take here we must give yonder; what we gain in dancing we must lose in turning round!

"But no woman can be brought to see this obvious necessity. For the feminine mind nothing is impracticable. Not a young lady eating bread and butter in the school-room but cherishes her own vision of the prince already riding through enchanted forests in her pursuit. The prince may turn out to be a curate, a cornet, or a count, a duke or a dairy-farmer, a baronet or a blacking-maker, that has nothing to do with it. Relying on her limitless heritage of the possible, she feels she has a prescriptive right