"I thought it was only the undergraduates who played games. You couldn't row in the boat, could you?"
"I could row you in a boat. We could get a lot of fun in Cambridge, and we could always go to London when we wanted to."
"And we could get a pretty house there—not too big?"
"Yes, we could get that. I think perhaps you're right about the big house. Whoever loves the golden mean will avoid a palace as much as a hovel. Horace says that, or something like it, and what is good enough for Horace is good enough for me, also for my sweet Upsidonian bride. Miriam, I adore you, and it is at least a quarter of an hour since I had a kiss."
So we settled to live in Cambridge when we got to England, in the prettiest house we could find, with the prettiest garden, and I prided myself greatly on the moderation of my desires, while Miriam wondered whether we were not laying up trouble for ourselves, when I said that we should want at least four servants in the sort of house I had in my mind.
[CHAPTER XVIII]
A day or two after Miriam had first invited me into her garden the invitation was made public in the fashionable intelligence of the Culbut newspapers, and she and I were the recipients of many congratulations from the numerous friends and relations of the Perrys.
We were entertained by not a few of them. We went to Sunday mid-day dinner with the Earl and Countess of Rumborough, in the parlour behind their shop, over which an aroma of jaded cauliflower lay more in evidence than is customary in the mansions of the great. We drank tea again with the Earl and Countess of Blueberry, and this time the head of the house was present, and treated me with a stately courtesy that impressed me a good deal with the dignity of the family with which I was about to connect myself. I also dined with the Viscount Sandpits, at the mess of his gang, sitting on a plank in the middle of one of the busiest streets in Culbut, and drinking beer out of a tin can.[31] A married sister of Mr. Perry's, not bitten with philanthropic ideas, gave a theatre party for us, and we sat in the front row of the pit, after an agreeable wait of an hour outside the door, and ate oranges between the acts. And we conferred a much-appreciated honour on a rich relation of Mr. Perry's by accepting an invitation to a dinner-party at her house. Her husband had been unfortunate in the coal business, and had sunk from a clerkship in a colliery company to owning the whole concern. Most of our fellow guests were melancholy and rather subservient people who had made a similar mess of their lives, and were pathetically envious of the bright prospects that were opening out before Miriam and me.
And finally, Mrs. Claudie Chanticleer, who had turned up one morning at Magnolia Hall, in a bedraggled and hectic state, to take away a few scraps from the dustbin, invited us to a picnic in the country, to meet all that was smartest and dirtiest in the exclusive set of which she was an ornament.