“She thinks to more purpose than you do; that is clear.”
“Nothing is left now but to ask her pardon, and to consent; I am off.”
“No, you are not,” and Jacintha laid a grasp of iron on him. “Will you be quiet?—is not one blunder a day enough? If you go near her now, she will affront you, and order the doctor not to speak to you.”
“O Jacintha! your sex then are fiends of malice?”
“While it lasts. Luckily with us nothing lasts very long. Now you don’t go near her till you have taken advantage of her hint, and made the doctor’s acquaintance; that is easy done. He walks two hours on the east road every day, with his feet in the puddles and his head in the clouds. Them’s HIS two tastes.”
“But how am I to get him out of the clouds and the puddles?” inquired Riviere half peevishly.
“How?” asked Jacintha, with a dash of that contempt uneducated persons generally have for any one who does not know some little thing they happen to know themselves. “How? Why, with the nearest blackbeetle, to be sure.”
“A blackbeetle?”
“Black or brown; it matters little. Have her ready for use in your handkerchief: pull a long face: and says you—‘Excuse me, sir, I have THE MISFORTUNE not to know the Greek name of this merchandise here.’ Say that, and behold him launched. He will christen you the beast in Hebrew and Latin as well as Greek, and tell you her history down from the flood: next he will beg her of you, and out will come a cork and a pin, and behold the creature impaled. For that is how men love beetles. He has a thousand pinned down at home—beetles, butterflies, and so forth. When I go near the rubbish with my duster he trembles like an aspen. I pretend to be going to clean them, but it is only to see the face he makes, for even a domestic must laugh now and then—or die. But I never do clean them, for after all he is more stupid than wicked, poor man: I have not therefore the sad courage to make him wretched.”
“Let us return to our beetle—what will his tirades about its antiquity advance me?”