VANCE—“Her cotton print! I see it still before me! But I must not be ungrateful. Would you believe it,—that little portrait, which cost me three pounds, has made, I don’t say my fortune, but my fashion?”
LIONEL—“How! You had the heart to sell it?”
VANCE.—“No; I kept it as a study for young female heads—‘with variations,’ as they say in music. It was by my female heads that I became the fashion; every order I have contains the condition, ‘But be sure, one of your sweet female heads, Mr. Vance.’ My female heads are as necessary to my canvas as a white horse to Wouvermans’. Well, that child, who cost me three pounds, is the original of them all. Commencing as a Titania, she has been in turns a ‘Psyche,’ a ‘Beatrice-Cenci,’ a ‘Minna,’ ‘A Portrait of a Nobleman’s Daughter,’ ‘Burns’s Mary in Heaven,’ ‘The Young Gleaner,’ and ‘Sabrina Fair,’ in Milton’s ‘Comus.’ I have led that child through all history, sacred and profane. I have painted her in all costumes (her own cotton print excepted). My female heads are my glory; even the ‘Times’ critic allows that! ‘Mr. Vance, there, is inimitable! a type of childlike grace peculiarly his own,’ etc. I’ll lend you the article.”
LIONEL.—“And shall we never again see the original darling Sophy? You will laugh, Vance, but I have been heartproof against all young ladies. If ever I marry, my wife must have Sophy’s eyes! In America!”
VANCE.—“Let us hope by this time happily married to a Yankee! Yankees marry girls in their teens, and don’t ask for dowries. Married to a Yankee! not a doubt of it! a Yankee who thaws, whittles, and keeps a ‘store’!”
LIONEL.—“Monster! Hold your tongue. A propos of marriage, why are you still single?”
VANCE.—“Because I have no wish to be doubled up! Moreover, man is like a napkin, the more neatly the housewife doubles him, the more carefully she lays him on the shelf. Neither can a man once doubled know how often he may be doubled. Not only his wife folds him in two, but every child quarters him into a new double, till what was a wide and handsome substance, large enough for anything in reason, dwindles into a pitiful square that will not cover one platter,—all puckers and creases, smaller and smaller with every double, with every double a new crease. Then, my friend, comes the washing-bill! and, besides all the hurts one receives in the mangle, consider the hourly wear and tear of the linen-press! In short, Shakspeare vindicates the single life, and depicts the double in the famous line, which is no doubt intended to be allegorical of marriage,
“‘Double, double, toil and trouble.’
Besides, no single man can be fairly called poor. What double man can with certainty be called rich? A single man can lodge in a garret, and dine on a herring: nobody knows; nobody cares. Let him marry, and he invites the world to witness where he lodges, and how he dines. The first necessary a wife demands is the most ruinous, the most indefinite superfluity; it is Gentility according to what her neighbours call genteel. Gentility commences with the honeymoon; it is its shadow, and lengthens as the moon declines. When the honey is all gone, your bride says, ‘We can have our tea without sugar when quite alone, love; but, in case Gentility drop in, here’s a bill for silver sugar-tongs!’ That’s why I’m single.”
“Economy again, Vance.”