‘Most dull dragoon, do you not know that, so long as a man spoons, he can talk of his affection for a woman; but that, once she is about to be his wife, or is actually his wife, he limits his avowals to her love for him?’
‘I never heard that before. I say, what a swell you are this morning. The cock-pheasants will mistake you for one of them.’
‘Nothing can be simpler, nothing quieter, I trust, than a suit of dark purple knickerbockers; and you may see that my thread stockings and my coarse shoes presuppose a stroll in the plantations, where, indeed, I mean to smoke my morning cigar.’
‘She’ll make you give up tobacco, I suppose?’
‘Nothing of the kind—a thorough woman of the world enforces no such penalties as these. True free-trade is the great matrimonial maxim, and for people of small means it is inestimable. The formula may be stated thus—‘Dine at the best houses, and give tea at your own.’
What other precepts of equal wisdom Walpole was prepared to enunciate were lost to the world by a message informing him that Miss Betty was in the drawing-room, and the family assembled, to see him.
Cecil Walpole possessed a very fair stock of that useful quality called assurance; but he had no more than he needed to enter that large room, where the assembled family sat in a half-circle, and stand to be surveyed by Miss O’Shea’s eye-glass, unabashed. Nor was the ordeal the less trying as he overheard the old lady ask her neighbour, ‘if he wasn’t the image of the Knave of Diamonds.’
‘I thought you were the other man!’ said she curtly, as he made his bow.
‘I deplore the disappointment, madam—even though I do not comprehend it.’
‘It was the picture, the photograph, of the other man I saw—a fine, tall, dark man, with long moustaches.’