Gorman could not help laughing at the more than ordinary irritability with which these words were spoken, and charged him at last with having uttered a personal experience.
‘True, after all!’ said Dick, half indolently. ‘I used to spoon a pretty girl up in Dublin, ride with her when I could, and dance with her at all the balls, and a certain chum of mine—a Joe Atlee—of whom you may have heard—under-took, simply by a series of artful rumours as to my future prospects—now extolling me as a man of fortune and a fine estate, to-morrow exhibiting me as a mere pretender with a mock title and mock income—to determine how I should be treated in this family; and he would say to me, “Dick, you are going to be asked to dinner on Saturday next”; or, “I say, old fellow, they’re going to leave you out of that picnic at Powerscourt. You’ll find the Clancys rather cold at your next meeting.”’
‘And he would be right in his guess?’
‘To the letter! Ay, and I shame to say that the young girl answered the signal as promptly as the mother.’
‘I hope it cured you of your passion?’
‘I don’t know that it did. When you begin to like a girl, and find that she has regularly installed herself in a corner of your heart, there is scarcely a thing she can do you’ll not discover a good reason for; and even when your ingenuity fails, go and pay a visit; there is some artful witchery in that creation you have built up about her—for I heartily believe most of us are merely clothing a sort of lay figure of loveliness with attributes of our fancy—and the end of it is, we are about as wise about our idols as the South Sea savages in their homage to the gods of their own carving.’
‘I don’t think that!’ said Gorman sternly. ‘I could no more invent the fascination that charms me than I could model a Venus or an Ariadne.’
‘I see where your mistake lies. You do all this, and never know you do it. Mind, I am only giving you Joe Atlee’s theory all this time; for though I believe in, I never invented it.’
‘And who is Atlee?’
‘A chum of mine—a clever dog enough—who, as he says himself, takes a very low opinion of mankind, and in consequence finds this a capital world to live in.’