“Don’t be a fool, Lucy.”
“Of course I know that you are in love. I hope you are not going to give over being in love, Johnny, because it is such fun.”
“Wait till you’re caught yourself, my girl.”
“I don’t mean to be caught till some great swell comes this way. And as great swells never do come into Tavistock Square I shan’t have a chance. I’ll tell you what I would like; I’d like to have a Corsair—or else a Giaour;—I think a Giaour would be nicest. Only a Giaour wouldn’t be a Giaour here, you know. Fancy a lover ‘Who thundering comes on blackest steed, With slackened bit and hoof of speed.’ Were not those the days to live in! But all that is over now, you know, and young people take houses in Woburn Place, instead of being locked up, or drowned, or married to a hideous monster behind a veil. I suppose it’s better as it is, for some reasons.”
“I think it must be more jolly, as you call it, Lucy.”
“I’m not quite sure. I know I’d go back and be Medora, if I could. Mamma is always telling Polly that she must be careful about William’s dinner. But Conrad didn’t care for his dinner. ‘Light toil! to cull and dress thy frugal fare! See, I have plucked the fruit that promised best.’ ”
“And how often do you think Conrad got drunk?”
“I don’t think he got drunk at all. There is no reason why he should, any more than William. Come along, and take me down to dinner. After all, papa’s leg of mutton is better than Medora’s apples, when one is as hungry as I am.”
The leg of mutton on this occasion consisted of soup, fish, and a bit of roast beef, and a couple of boiled fowls. “If I had only two children instead of twelve, Mr. Walker,” said the host, “I’d give you a dinner à la Russe.”
“I don’t begrudge Mrs. Toogood a single arrow in her quiver on that score,” said Mr. Walker.
“People are getting to be so luxurious that one can’t live up to them at all,” said Mrs. Toogood. “We dined out here with some newcomers in the square only last week. We had asked them before, and they came quite in a quiet way—just like this; and when we got there we found they’d four kinds of ices after dinner!”
“And not a morsel of food on the table fit to eat,” said Toogood. “I never was so poisoned in my life. As for soup—it was just the washings of the pastrycook’s kettle next door.”
“And how is one to live with such people, Mr. Walker?” continued Mrs. Toogood. “Of course we can’t ask them back again. We can’t give them four kinds of ices.”
“But would that be necessary? Perhaps they haven’t got twelve children.”
“They haven’t got any,” said Toogood, triumphing; “not a chick belonging to them. But you see one must do as other people do. I hate anything grand. I wouldn’t want more than this for myself, if banknotes were as plenty as curl-papers.”
“Nobody has any curl-papers now, papa,” said Lucy.
“But I can’t bear to be outdone,” said Mr. Toogood. “I think it’s very unpleasant—people living in that sort of way. It’s all very well telling me that I needn’t live so too;—and of course I don’t. I can’t afford to have four men in from the confectioner’s, dressed a sight better than myself, at ten shillings a head. I can’t afford it, and I don’t do it. But the worst of it is that I suffer because other people do it. It stands to reason that I must either be driven along with the crowd, or else be left behind. Now, I don’t like either. And what’s the end of it? Why, I’m half carried away and half left behind.”
“Upon my word, papa, I don’t think you’re carried away at all,” said Lucy.
“Yes, I am; and I’m ashamed of myself. Mr. Walker, I don’t dare to ask you to drink a glass of wine with me in my own house—that’s what I don’t—because it’s the proper thing for you to wait till somebody brings it you, and then to drink it by yourself. There is no knowing whether I mightn’t offend you.” And Mr. Toogood as he spoke grasped the decanter at his elbow. Mr. Walker grasped another at his elbow, and the two attorneys took their glass of wine together.
“A very queer case this is of my cousin Crawley’s,” said Toogood to Walker, when the ladies had left the dining-room.
“A most distressing case. I never knew anything so much talked of in our part of the country.”
“He can’t have been a popular man, I should say?”
“No; not popular—not in the ordinary way;—anything but that. Nobody knew him personally before this matter came up.”
“But a good clergyman, probably? I’m interested in the case, of course, as his wife is my first-cousin. You will understand, however, that I know nothing of him. My father tried to be civil to him once, but Crawley wouldn’t have it at all. We all thought he was mad then. I suppose he has done his duty in his parish?”
“He has quarrelled with the bishop, you know—out and out.”
“Has he, indeed?
