In his rare moments
of amiability, he could talk on such matters with _verve_ and originality:
more usually he preferred to pursue with the bitterest animosity an
abstract fetish which he called his "luck." He was by temperament an
enraged pessimist; and I could believe, that he seriously attributed to
Providence, some quality inconceivably malignant, directed in all things
personally against himself. His immense bitterness and his careful avarice,
alike, I could explain, and in a measure justify, when I came to understand
that he had felt the sharpest stings of poverty, and, moreover, was
passionately in love, in love _comme on ne l'est plus_. As to what his
previous resources had been, I knew nothing, nor why they had failed him;
but I gathered that the crisis had come, just when his life was complicated
by the sudden blossoming of an old friendship into love, in his case, at
least, to be complete and final. The girl too was poor; they were poorer
than most poor persons: how could he refuse the post, which, through
the good offices of a friend, was just then unexpectedly offered him?
Certainly, it was abroad; it implied five years' solitude in Equatorial
America. Separation and change were to be accounted; perhaps, diseases and
death, and certainly his 'luck,' which seemed to include all these.
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