He was a diamond-cutter, originally from Holland, came over to
England and married the daughter of a mathematical instrument maker,
at whose house he lodged in Clerkenwell. The son was apprenticed to
his maternal grandfather's trade, became very skilful at it, worked
at it himself, employed a man and a boy, and supplied London shops,
which sold his instruments at about three times the price he obtained
for them. Baruch, when he was very young, married Marshall's elder
sister, but she died at the birth of her first child and he had been
a widower now for nineteen years. He had often thought of taking
another wife, and had seen, during these nineteen years, two or three
women with whom he had imagined himself to be really in love, and to
whom he had been on the verge of making proposals, but in each case
he had hung back, and when he found that a second and a third had
awakened the same ardour for a time as the first, he distrusted its
genuineness. He was now, too, at a time of life when a man has to
make the unpleasant discovery that he is beginning to lose the right
to expect what he still eagerly desires, and that he must beware of
being ridiculous. It is indeed a very unpleasant discovery. If he
has done anything well which was worth doing, or has made himself a
name, he may be treated by women with respect or adulation, but any
passable boy of twenty is really more interesting to them, and,
unhappily, there is perhaps so much of the man left in him that he
would rather see the eyes of a girl melt when she looked at him than
be adored by all the drawing-rooms in London as the author of the
greatest poem since Paradise Lost, or as the conqueror of half a
continent.
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