“Yes, he did.”
“Well, he ain’t, anyhow. See?”
“Oh, isn’t he? Who says he isn’t?”
“I do.”
“Punch his head, Dick!”
“Yes, you do, Jimmy Blake, and I’ll punch yours. Come, Kelver.”
I might have been some Queen of Beauty offered as prize for knightly contest. Indeed, more than once the argument concluded thus primitively, I being carried off in triumph by the victorious party.
For a period it remained a mystery to me, until I asked explanation of Norval – we called him “Norval,” he being one George Grampian: it was our wit. From taking joy in teasing me, Norval had suddenly become one of my greatest admirers. This by itself was difficult enough to understand. He was in the second eleven, and after Dan the best fighter in the lower school. If I could understand Norval’s change of attitude all would be plain to me; so when next time, bounding upon me in the cloakroom and slipping his arm into mine, he clamoured for my company to Camden Town, I put the question to him bluntly.
“Why should I walk home with you? Why do you want me?”
“Because we like you.”
“But why do you like me?”
“Why! Why, because you’re such a funny chap. You say such funny things.”
It struck me like a slap in the face. I had thought to reach popularity upon the ladder of heroic qualities. In all the school books I had read, Leonard or Marmaduke (we had a Marmaduke in the Lower Fifth – they called him Marmalade: in the school books these disasters are not contemplated), won love and admiration by reason of integrity of character, nobility of sentiment, goodness of heart, brilliance of intellect; combined maybe with a certain amount of agility, instinct in the direction of bowling, or aptitude for jumping; but such only by the way. Not one of them had ever said a funny thing, either consciously or unconsciously.
“Don’t be disagreeable, Kelver. Come with us and we will let you into the team as an extra. I’ll teach you batting.”
So I was to be their Fool – I, dreamer of knightly dreams, aspirant to hero’s fame! I craved their wonder; I had won their laughter. I had prayed for popularity; it had been granted to me – in this guise. Were the gods still the heartless practical jokers poor Midas had found them?
Had my vanity been less I should have flung their gift back in their faces. But my thirst for approbation was too intense. I had to choose: Cut capers and be followed, or walk in dignity, ignored. I chose to cut the capers. As time wore on I found myself striving to cut them quicker, quainter, thinking out funny stories, preparing ingenuous impromptus, twisting all ideas into odd expression.
I had my reward. Before long my company was desired by all the school. But I was never content. I would rather have been the Captain of their football club, even his deputy Vice; would have given all my meed of laughter for stuttering Jerry’s one round of applause when in our match against Highbury he knocked up his century, and so won the victory for us by just three.
Till the end I never quite abandoned hope of exchanging my vine leaves for the laurels. I would rise an hour earlier in the morning to practise throwing at broomsticks set up in waste places. At another time, the sport coming into temporary fashion, I wearied body and mind for weeks in vain attempts to acquire skill on stilts. That even fat Tubby could out-distance me upon them saddened my life for months.
A lad there was, a Sixth Form boy, one Wakeham by name, if I remember rightly, who greatly envied me my gift of being able to amuse. He was of the age when the other sex begins to be of importance to a fellow, and the desire had come to him to be regarded as a star of wit among the social circles of Gospel Oak. Need I say that by nature he was a ponderously dull boy.
One afternoon I happened to be the centre of a small group in the playground. I had been holding forth and they had been laughing. Whether I had delivered myself of anything really entertaining or not I cannot say. It made no difference; they had got into the habit of laughing when I talked. Sometimes I would say quite serious things on purpose; they would laugh just the same. Wakeham was among them, his eyes fixed on me, watching me as boys watch a conjurer in the hope of finding out “how he does it.” Later in the afternoon he slipped his arm through mine, and drew me away into an empty corner of the ground.
“I say, Kelver,” he broke out, the moment we were beyond hearing, “you really are funny!”
It gave me no pleasure. If he had told me that he admired my bowling I might not have believed him, but should have loved him for it.
“So are you,” I answered savagely, “only you don’t know it.”
“No, I’m not,” he replied. “Wish I was. I say, Kelver” – he glanced round to see that no one was within earshot – “do you think you could teach me to be funny?”
I was about to reply with conviction in the negative when an idea occurred to me. Wakeham was famous among us for one thing; he could, inserting two fingers in his mouth, produce a whistle capable of confusing dogs a quarter of a mile off, and of causing people near at hand to jump from six to eighteen inches into the air.
This accomplishment of his I envied him as keenly as he envied me mine. I did not admire it; I could not see the use of it. Generally speaking, it called forth irritation rather than affection. A purple-faced old gentleman, close to whose ear he once performed, promptly cuffed his head for it; and for so doing was commended by the whole street as a public benefactor. Drivers of vehicles would respond by flicking at him, occasionally with success. Even youth, from whom sympathy might have been expected, appeared impelled, if anything happened to be at all handy, to take it up and throw it at him. My own social circle would, I knew, regard it as a vulgar accomplishment, and even Wakeham himself dared not perform it in the hearing of his own classmates. That any human being should have desired to acquire it seems incomprehensible. Yet for weeks in secret I had wrestled to produce the hideous sound. Why? For three reasons, so far as I can analyse this youngster of whom I am writing:
Firstly, here was a means of attracting attention; secondly, it was something that somebody else could do and that he couldn’t; thirdly, it was a thing for which he evidently had no natural aptitude whatever, and therefore a thing to acquire which his soul yearned the more. Had a boy come across his path, clever at walking on his hands with his heels in the air, Master Paul Kelver would in all probability have broken his neck in attempts to copy and excel. I make no apologies for the brat: I merely present him as a study for the amusement of a world of wiser boys – and men.
I struck a bargain with young Wakeham; I undertook to teach him to be funny in return for his teaching me this costermonger’s whistle.
Each of us strove conscientiously to impart knowledge. Neither of us succeeded. Wakeham tried hard to be funny; I tried hard to whistle. He did all I told him; I followed his instructions implicitly. The result was the feeblest of wit and the feeblest of whistles.
“Do you think anybody would laugh at that?” Wakeham would pathetically enquire at the termination of his supremest effort. And honestly I would have to confess I did not think any living being would.
“How far off do you think any one could hear that?” I would demand anxiously, on recovering sufficient breath to speak at all.
“Well, it would depend upon whether you knew it was coming,” Wakeham would reply kindly, not wishing to discourage me.
We abandoned the scheme by mutual consent at about the end of a fortnight.
“I suppose it’s something that you’ve got to have inside you,” I suggested to Wakeham in consolation.
“I don’t think the roof of your mouth can be quite the right shape for it,” concluded Wakeham.
My success as story-teller, commentator, critic, jester, revived my childish ambition towards authorship. My first stirrings in this direction I cannot rightly place. I remember when very small falling into a sunk dust-bin – a deep hole, rather, into which the gardener shot his rubbish. The fall twisted my ankle so that I could not move; and the time being evening and my prison some distance from the house, my predicament loomed large before me. Yet one consolation remained with me: the incident would be of value to me in the autobiography upon which I was then engaged. I can distinctly recollect lying on my back among decaying leaves and broken glass, framing my account. “On this day a strange adventure befell me. Walking in the garden, all unheeding, I suddenly” – I did not want to add the truth – “tumbled into a dust-hole, six feet square, that any one but a moon calf might have seen.” I puzzled to evolve a more dignified situation. The dust-bin became a cavern, the entrance to which had been artfully concealed; the six or seven feet I had really fallen, “an endless descent, terminating in a vast and gloomy chamber.” I was divided between opposing desires: One, for rescue followed by sympathy and supper; the other, for the alarming experience of a night of terror where I lay. Nature conquering Art, I yelled; and the episode terminated prosaically with a warm bath and arnica. But from it I judge that desire for the woes and perils of authorship was with me somewhat early.
Of my many other dreams I would speak freely, discussing them at length with sympathetic souls, but concerning this one ambition I was curiously reticent. Only to two – my mother and a grey-bearded Stranger – did I ever breathe a word of it. Even from my father I kept it a secret, close comrades in all else though we were. He would have talked of it much and freely, dragged it into the light of day; and from this I shrank.
My talk with the Stranger came about in this wise. One evening I had taken a walk to Victoria Park – a favourite haunt of mine at summer time. It was a fair and peaceful evening, and I fell a-wandering there in pleasant reverie, until the waning light hinted to me the question of time. I looked about me. Only one human being was in sight, a man with his back towards me, seated upon a bench overlooking the ornamental water.
I drew nearer. He took no notice of me, and interested – though why, I could not say – I seated myself beside him at the other end of the bench. He was a handsome, distinguished-looking man, with wonderfully bright, clear eyes and iron-grey hair and beard. I might have thought him a sea captain, of whom many were always to be met with in that neighbourhood, but for his hands, which were crossed upon his stick, and which were white and delicate as a woman’s. He turned his face and glanced at me. I fancied that his lips beneath the grey moustache smiled; and instinctively I edged a little nearer to him.
“Please, sir,” I said, after awhile, “could you tell me the right time?”
“Twenty minutes to eight,” he answered, looking at his watch. And his voice drew me towards him even more than had his beautiful strong face. I thanked him, and we fell back into silence.
“Where do you live?” he turned and suddenly asked me.
“Oh, only over there,” I answered, with a wave of my arm towards the chimney-fringed horizon behind us. “I needn’t be in till half-past eight. I like this Park so much,” I added, “I often come and sit here of an evening.’
“Why do you like to come and sit here?” he asked. “Tell me.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered. “I think.”
I marvelled at myself. With strangers generally I was shy and silent; but the magic of his bright eyes seemed to have loosened my tongue.
I told him my name; that we lived in a street always full of ugly sounds, so that a gentleman could not think, not even in the evening time, when Thought goes a-visiting.
“Mamma does not like the twilight time,” I confided to him. “It always makes her cry. But then mamma is – not very young, you know, and has had a deal of trouble; and that makes a difference, I suppose.”
He laid his hand upon mine. We were sitting nearer to each other now. “God made women weak to teach us men to be tender,” he said. “But you, Paul, like this ‘twilight time’?”
“Yes,” I answered, “very much. Don’t you?”
“And why do you like it?” he asked.
“Oh,” I answered, “things come to you.”
“What things?”
“Oh, fancies,” I explained to him. “I am going to be an author when I grow up, and write books.”
He took my hand in his and shook it gravely, and then returned it to me. “I, too, am a writer of books,” he said.
And then I knew what had drawn me to him.
So for the first time I understood the joy of talking “shop” with a fellow craftsman. I told him my favourite authors – Scott, and Dumas, and Victor Hugo; and to my delight found they were his also; he agreeing with me that real stories were the best, stories in which people did things.
“I used to read silly stuff once,” I confessed, “Indian tales and that sort of thing, you know. But mamma said I’d never be able to write if I read that rubbish.”
“You will find it so all through life, Paul,” he replied. “The things that are nice are rarely good for us. And what do you read now?”
“I am reading Marlowe’s Plays and De Quincey’s Confessions just now,” I confided to him.
“And do you understand them?”
“Fairly well,” I answered. “Mamma says I’ll like them better as I go on. I want to learn to write very, very well indeed,” I admitted to him; “then I’ll be able to earn heaps of money.”
He smiled. “So you don’t believe in Art for Art’s sake, Paul?”
I was puzzled. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means in our case, Paul,” he answered, “writing books for the pleasure of writing books, without thinking of any reward, without desiring either money or fame.”
It was a new idea to me. “Do many authors do that?” I asked.
He laughed outright this time. It was a delightful laugh. It rang through the quiet Park, awaking echoes; and caught by it, I laughed with him.
“Hush!” he said; and he glanced round with a whimsical expression of fear, lest we might have been overheard. “Between ourselves, Paul,” he continued, drawing me more closely towards him and whispering, “I don’t think any of us do. We talk about it. But I’ll tell you this, Paul; it is a trade secret and you must remember it: No man ever made money or fame but by writing his very best. It may not be as good as somebody else’s best, but it is his best. Remember that, Paul.”
I promised I would.
“And you must not think merely of the money and the fame, Paul,” he added the next moment, speaking more seriously. “Money and fame are very good things, and only hypocrites pretend to despise them. But if you write books thinking only of money, you will be disappointed. It is earned easier in other ways. Tell me, that is not your only idea?”
I pondered. “Mamma says it is a very noble calling, authorship,” I remembered, “and that any one ought to be very proud and glad to be able to write books, because they give people happiness and make them forget things; and that one ought to be very good if one is going to be an author, so as to be worthy to help and teach others.”
“And do you try to be good, Paul?” he enquired.
“Yes,” I answered; “but it’s very hard to be quite good – until of course you’re grown up.”
He smiled, but more to himself than to me. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose it is difficult to be good until you are grown up. Perhaps we shall all of us be good when we’re quite grown up.” Which, from a gentleman with a grey beard, appeared to me a puzzling observation.
“And what else does mamma say about literature?” he asked. “Can you remember?”
Again I pondered, and her words came back to me. “That he who can write a great book is greater than a king; that the gift of being able to write is given to anybody in trust; that an author should never forget he is God’s servant.”
He sat for awhile without speaking, his chin resting on his folded hands supported by his gold-topped cane. Then he turned and laid a hand upon my shoulder, and his clear, bright eyes were close to mine.
“Your mother is a wise lady, Paul,” he said. “Remember her words always. In later life let them come back to you; they will guide you better than the chatter of the Clubs.”
“And what modern authors do you read?” he asked after a silence: “any of them – Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, Dickens?”
“I have read ‘The Last of the Barons,’” I told him; “I like that. And I’ve been to Barnet and seen the church. And some of Mr. Dickens’.”
“And what do you think of Mr. Dickens?” he asked. But he did not seem very interested in the subject. He had picked up a few small stones, and was throwing them carefully into the water.
“I like him very much,” I answered; “he makes you laugh.”
“Not always?” he asked. He stopped his stone-throwing, and turned sharply towards me.
“Oh, no, not always,” I admitted; “but I like the funny bits best. I like so much where Mr. Pickwick – ”
“Oh, damn Mr. Pickwick!” he said.
“Don’t you like him?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, I like him well enough, or used to,” he replied; “I’m a bit tired of him, that’s all. Does your mamma like Mr. – Mr. Dickens?”
“Not the funny parts,” I explained to him. “She thinks he is occasionally – ”
“I know,” he interrupted, rather irritably, I thought; “a trifle vulgar.”
It surprised me that he should have guessed her exact words. “I don’t think mamma has much sense of humour,” I explained to him. “Sometimes she doesn’t even see papa’s jokes.”
At that he laughed again. “But she likes the other parts?” he enquired, “the parts where Mr. Dickens isn’t – vulgar?”
“Oh, yes,” I answered. “She says he can be so beautiful and tender, when he likes.”
Twilight was deepening. It occurred to me to enquire of him again the time.
“Just over the quarter,” he answered, looking at his watch.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I must go now.”
“So am I sorry, Paul,” he answered. “Perhaps we shall meet again. Good-bye.” Then as our hands touched: “You have never asked me my name, Paul,” he reminded me.
“Oh, haven’t I?” I answered.
“No, Paul,” he replied, “and that makes me think of your future with hope. You are an egotist, Paul; and that is the beginning of all art.”
And after that he would not tell me his name. “Perhaps next time we meet,” he said. “Good-bye, Paul. Good luck to you!”
So I went my way. Where the path winds out of sight I turned. He was still seated upon the bench, but his face was towards me, and he waved his hand to me. I answered with a wave of mine. And then the intervening boughs and bushes gradually closed in around me. And across the rising mist there rose the hoarse, harsh cry:
“All out! All out!”
CHAPTER X.
IN WHICH PAUL IS SHIPWRECKED, AND CAST INTO DEEP WATERS
My father died, curiously enough, on the morning of his birthday. We had not expected the end to arrive for some time, and at first did not know that it had come.
“I have left him sleeping,” said my mother, who had slipped out very quietly in her dressing-gown. “Washburn gave him a draught last night. We won’t disturb him.”
So we sat round the breakfast table, speaking in low tones, for the house was small and flimsy, all sound easily heard through its thin partitions. Afterwards my mother crept upstairs, I following, and cautiously opened the door a little way.
The blinds were still down, and the room dark. It seemed a long time that my mother stood there listening, her ear against the jar. The first costermonger – a girl’s voice, it sounded – passed, crying shrilly: “Watercreases, fine fresh watercreases with your breakfast-a’penny a bundle watercreases;” and further off a hoarse youth was wailing: “Mee-ilk-mee-ilk-oi.”
Inch by inch my mother opened the door wider and we stole in. He was lying with his eyes still closed, the lips just slightly parted. I had never seen death before, and could not realise it. All that I could see was that he looked even younger than I had ever seen him look before. By slow degrees only, it came home to me, the knowledge that he was gone away from us. For days – for weeks, I would hear his step behind me in the street, his voice calling to me, see his face among the crowds, and hastening to meet him, stand bewildered because it had mysteriously disappeared. But at first I felt no pain whatever.
To my mother it was but a short parting. Into her placid faith had never fallen fear nor doubt. He was waiting for her. In God’s good time they would meet again. What need of sorrow! Without him the days passed slowly: the house must ever be a little dull when the good man’s away. But that was all. So my mother would speak of him always – of his dear, kind ways, of his oddities and follies we loved so to recall, not through tears, but smiles, thinking of him not as of one belonging to the past, but as of one beckoning to her from the future.
We lived on still in the old house though ever planning to move, for the great brick monster had crept closer round about us year by year, devouring in his progress all things fair. Field and garden, tree and cottage, time-mellowed house suggesting story, kind hedgerow hiding hideousness beyond – the few spots yet in that doomed land lingering to remind one of the sunshine, one by one had he scrunched them between his ugly teeth. A world apart, this east end of London, this ghetto of the poor for ever growing, dreariness added year by year to dreariness, hopelessness stretching ever farther its long, shrivelled arms, these endless rows of reeking cells where London herds her slaves. Often of a misty afternoon when we knew that without this city of the dead life was stirring in the sunshine, we would fare forth to house-hunt in pleasant suburbs, now themselves added to the weary catacomb of narrow streets – to Highgate, then a tiny town connected by a coach with leafy Holloway; to Hampstead with its rows of ancient red-brick houses, from whose wind-blown heath one saw beyond the woods and farms, far London’s domes and spires, to Wood Green among the pastures, where smock-coated labourers discussed their politics and ale beneath wide-spreading elms; to Hornsey, then a village consisting of an ivy-covered church and one grass-bordered way. But though we often saw “the very thing for us” and would discuss its possibilities from every point of view and find them good, we yet delayed.
“We must think it over,” would say my mother; “there is no hurry; for some reasons I shall be sorry to leave Poplar.”
“For what reasons, mother?”
“Oh, well, no particular reason, Paul. Only we have lived there so long, you know. It will be a wrench leaving the old house.”
To the making of man go all things, even to the instincts of the clinging vine. We fling our tendrils round what is the nearest castle-keep or pig-stye wall, rain and sunshine fastening them but firmer. Dying Sir Walter Scott – do you remember? – hastening home from Italy, fearful lest he might not be in time to breathe again the damp mists of the barren hills. An ancient dame I knew, they had carried her from her attic in slumland that she might be fanned by the sea breezes, and the poor old soul lay pining for what she called her “home.” Wife, mother, widow, she had lived there till the alley’s reek smelt good to her nostrils, till its riot was the voices of her people. Who shall understand us save He who fashioned us?
So the old house held us to its dismal bosom; and not until within its homely but unlovely arms, first my aunt, and later on my mother had died, and I had said good-bye to Amy, crying in the midst of littered emptiness, did I leave it.
My aunt died as she had lived, grumbling.
“You will be glad to get rid of me, all of you!” she said, dropping for the first and last time I can recollect into the retort direct; “and I can’t say I shall be very sorry to go myself. It hasn’t been my idea of life.”
Poor old lady! That was only a couple of weeks before the end. I do not suppose she guessed it was so certain or perhaps she might have been more sentimental.
“Don’t be foolish,” said my mother, “you’re not going to die!”
“What’s the use of talking like an idiot,” retorted my aunt, “I’ve got to do it some time. Why not now, when everything’s all ready for it. It isn’t as if I was enjoying myself.”
“I am sure we do all we can for you,” said my mother. “I know you do,” replied my aunt. “I’m a burden to you. I always have been.”
“Not a burden,” corrected my mother.
“What does the woman call it then,” snapped back my aunt. “Does she reckon I’ve been a sunbeam in the house? I’ve been a trial to everybody. That’s what I was born for; it’s my metier.”
My mother put her arms about the poor old soul and kissed her. “We should miss you very much,” she said.
“I’m sure I hope they all will!” answered my aunt. “It’s the only thing I’ve got to leave ‘em, worth having.”
My mother laughed.
“Maybe it’s been a good thing for you, Maggie,” grumbled my aunt; “if it wasn’t for cantankerous, disagreeable people like me, gentle, patient people like you wouldn’t get any practice. Perhaps, after all, I’ve been a blessing to you in disguise.”
I cannot honestly say we ever wished her back; though we certainly did miss her – missed many a joke at her oddities, many a laugh at her cornery ways. It takes all sorts, as the saying goes, to make a world. Possibly enough if only we perfect folk were left in it we would find it uncomfortably monotonous.
As for Amy, I believe she really regretted her.
“One never knows what’s good for one till one’s lost it,” sighed Amy.
“I’m glad to think you liked her,” said my mother.
“You see, mum,” explained Amy, “I was one of a large family; and a bit of a row now and again cheers one up, I always think. I’ll be losing the power of my tongue if something doesn’t come along soon.”
“Well, you are going to be married in a few weeks now,” my mother reminded her.
But Amy remained despondent. “They’re poor things, the men, at a few words, the best of them,” she replied. “As likely as not just when you’re getting interested you turn round to find that they’ve put on their hat and gone out.”
My mother and I were very much alone after my aunt’s death. Barbara had gone abroad to put the finishing touches to her education – to learn the tricks of the Nobs’ trade, as old Hasluck phrased it; and I had left school and taken employment with Mr. Stillwood, without salary, the idea being that I should study for the law.
“You are in luck’s way, my boy, in luck’s way,” old Mr. Gadley had assured me. “To have commenced your career in the office of Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal will be a passport for you anywhere. It will stamp you, my boy.”
Mr. Stillwood himself was an extremely old and feeble gentleman – so old and feeble it seemed strange that he, a wealthy man, had not long ago retired.
“I am always meaning to,” he explained to me one day soon after my advent in his office. “When your poor father came to me he told me very frankly the sad fact – that he had only a few more years to live. ‘Mr. Kelver,’ I answered him, ‘do not let that trouble you, so far as I am concerned. There are one or two matters in the office I should like to see cleared up, and in these you can help me. When they are completed I shall retire! Yet, you see, I linger on. I am like the old hackney coach horse, Mr. Weller – or is it Mr. Jingle – tells us of; if the shafts were drawn away I should probably collapse. So I jog on, I jog on.’”
He had married late in life a common woman much younger than himself, who had brought to him a horde of needy and greedy relatives, and no doubt, as a refuge from her noisy neighbourhood, the daily peace of Lombard Street was welcome to him. We saw her occasionally. She was one of those blustering, “managing” women who go through life under the impression that making a disturbance is somehow “putting things to rights.” Ridiculously ashamed of her origin, she sought to hide it under what her friends assured her was the air of a duchess, but which, as a matter of fact, resembled rather the Sunday manners of an elderly barmaid. Mr. Gadley alone was not afraid of her; but, on the contrary, kept her always very much in fear of him, often speaking to her with refreshing candour. He had known her in the days it was her desire should be buried in oblivion, and had always resented as a personal insult her entry into the old established aristocratic firm of Stillwood & Co.
Her history was peculiar. Mr. Stillwood, when a blase man about town, verging on forty, had first seen her, then a fair-haired, ethereal-looking child, in spite of her dirt, playing in the gutter. To his lasting self-reproach it was young Gadley himself, accompanying his employer home from Westminster, who had drawn Mr. Stillwood’s attention to the girl by boxing her ears for having, as he passed, slapped his face with a convenient sprat. Stillwood, acting on the impulse of the moment, had taken the child by the hand and dragged her, unwilling, to her father’s place of business – a small coal shed in the Horseferry Road. The arrangement he there made amounted practically to the purchase of the child. She was sent abroad to school and the coal shed closed. On her return, ten years later, a big, handsome young woman, he married her, and learned at leisure the truth of the old saying, “what’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh,” scrub it and paint it and hide it away under fine clothes as you will.
Her constant complaint against her husband was that he was only a solicitor, a profession she considered vulgar; and nothing “riled” old Gadley more than hearing her views upon this point.
“It’s not fair to the gals,” I once heard her say to him. I was working in the next room, with the door not quite closed, added to which she talked at the top of her voice on all subjects. “What real gentleman, I should like to know, is going to marry the daughter of a City attorney? As I told him years ago, he ought to have retired and gone into the House.”
“The very thing your poor father used to talk of doing whenever things were going a bit queer in the retail coal and potato business,” grunted old Gadley.
Mrs. Stillwood called him a “low beast” in her most aristocratic tones, and swept out of the room.