“She’s right,” said Barnard, with a half smile.
“Well, I half suspect she is. I could be a charming lover, but I fear I’d make only a sorry husband. My qualities are too brilliant for every-day use. It is your dreary fellows, with a tiresome monotony of nature, do best in that melancholy mill they call marriage. You, for instance, ought to be a model ‘mari.’”
“You are not disposed to give me the chance, I think,” said Barnard, peevishly.
“On the contrary, I am preparing you most carefully for your career. Conjugal life is a reformatory. You must come to it as a penitent Now I’ll teach you the first part of your lesson; your wife shall supply the second.”
“I’d relish this much better if—”
“I had not lost that money, you were going to say. Out with it, man. When a fellow chances upon a witty thing, he has a right to repeat it; besides, you have reason on your side. A loser is always wrong. But after all, Bob, whether the game be war, or marriage, or a horse-race, one’s skill has very little to say to it Make the wisest combinations that ever were fashioned, and you’ll lose sometimes. Draw your card at hazard, and you’ll win. If you only saw the fellow that beat me t’other day in a girl’s affections—as dreary a dog as ever you met in your life, without manliness, without ‘go’ in him—and yet he wasn’t a curate. I know you suspect he was a curate.”
“If you come through this affair all right, what do you intend to turn to, Calvert?” said the other, who really felt a sort of interest in his fortunes.
“I have thought of several things: the Church—the Colonies—Patent Fuel—Marriage—Turkish Baths, and a Sympathy Society for Suffering Nationalities, with a limited liability to all who subscribe fifty pounds and upwards.”
“But, seriously, have you any plans?”
“Ten thousand plans! I have plans enough to ruin all Threadneedle Street; but what use are plans? What’s the good of an architect in a land were there are no bricks, no mortar, and no timber? When I’ve shot Graham, I’ve a plan how to make my escape out of Switzerland; but, beyond that, nothing; not one step, I promise you. See, yonder is Monte Rosa; how grand he looks in the still calm air of the morning. What a gentleman a mountain is! how independent of the changeful fortunes of the plains, where grass succeeds tillage, and what is barley to-day, may be a brick-field to-morrow; but the mountain is ever the same—proud and cold if you will, but standing above all the accidents of condition, and asserting itself by qualities which are not money-getting. I’d like to live in a land of mountains, if it were not for the snobs that come to climb them.”