"Well, I'm thinking of it," Bob announced. And he added, with a ludicrous air of desiring the suspicion, while he repudiated the fact, of dishonourable intentions, "All on the square, of course."
"Good heavens, I should think so!" said Ashley. The imagination of man could attribute no crooked dealings or irregular positions to Miss Soames.
"Still, I don't know about the governor," Bob ended, with a relapse into gloom.
"She'd retire from her work, of course?" Ashley suggested, smiling.
"If she married me? Oh, of course," said Bob decisively. "She wouldn't want the money, would she?" Any other end of a profession had not occurred to him, and his opinion that active and public avocations were not "unsexing" to women was limited by the proviso that such employments must be necessary for bread-and-butter.
An eye for the variety of the human mind may make almost any society endurable. Here was Bob struggling with conscious daring against convention, as a prelude to paying his court to a lady who worshipped the god whom he persuaded himself to brave; here was Babba Flint drifting vulgarly, cheerfully, irresponsibly, through all his life and what money he happened from time to time to possess; here was Bertie Jewett, his feet set resolutely on the upward track, scorning diversion, crying "Excelsior" with exalted fervour as he pictured the gold he would gather and pocket on the summit of the hill; here, finally, was Ashley himself, who had once set out to climb another hill, and now eagerly turned his head to listen to a sweet voice that cried to him from the valley. Such differences may lie behind four precisely similar and equally spotless white shirt-fronts on the next sofa any evening that we drop into the club. Therefore it needs discrimination, and perhaps also some prepossessions, to assign degrees of merit to the different ideas of how time in this world had best be passed.
"The fact is," Babba was saying to Bertie Jewett, as he nodded a knowing head towards Ashley, "he was getting restive, so she made up this yarn about her husband." He yawned, as if the matter were plain to dulness.
"What an ass he is!" mused Bertie. "Don't you know the chance he had? He might have been where I am!"
Babba turned a rather supercilious look on his companion.
"The shop? Must be a damned grind, isn't it?"