It was evening, and I stood watching the moon rise peacefully and look down on the gleaming but troubled waters of the little bay. Placid and poetic she went up among her attendant stars. The wooded shore lay about us dark and mysterious.
“Let me,” I said to myself, “recapitulate. Presbyterianism is insufficient. Scientific celebrity is insufficient. The precise conscience and balance of rectitude are to the lover as a wire twitchup to the hungry rabbit. Action, sharp decision, the habit, so to speak, of getting there, these are what appeal to Mrs. Mink.”
Now, along those lines Professor Simpson was no slouch of a rival. In point of character he was hard as nails; in decision and action he was energetic and exact. Yet he had failed. He had speared himself, as it were, on the angle of an impractical conscience. But where did I come in? I, who in point of character was a semiliquid jelly fish, an invertebrate protozoan, whose nature was to float on the heaving and uncertain sea of humour, bathed in the moonlight of poetry, devouring the chance drift of knowledge, sucking philosophy out of rock; whose centre of personality was loose; whose mind was as untidy as a cuttlefish; how could I appeal to Mrs. Mink? On the evidence so far, I had but one strong point, namely a practical conscience, a conscience which, having always treated me with a great deal of—shall I say, with a great deal of tact?—was a conscience that——
At this point in my reflection Mrs. Mink came on deck.
When doubtful in whist, play trumps. When doubtful in any other situation, ask Mrs. Mink. Her counsel is always trumps.
“Mrs. Mink,” I said, as she came and stood beside me at the rail, “I am in doubt.”
“What about?”
“The question is this: If a disorderly cuttlefish has proposed marriage to one of those small neat birds who yet have the knack of making themselves at home in a wilderness of waves, and by sailors are called 'Mother Carey's chickens'; if so far as the cuttlefish can see he has only succeeded in producing in Mother Carey's chicken a state of unconvinced reflection; if he knows his structure to be floppy and his nature sloppy, what, in fact, do you think he should do?”
“I don't think you're a cuttlefish.”
“Ha! I don't insist on the figure.”