“Patrician descent be hanged! Who doubts that your lordlings may have their ‘distinctive cast of form and features’ as much as we ——shire tradesmen have ours? But which is the best? Not theirs assuredly. As to their women, it is a little different: they cultivate beauty from childhood upwards, and may by care and training attain to a certain degree of excellence in that point, just like the oriental odalisques. Yet even this superiority is doubtful. Compare the figure in that frame with Mrs. Edward Crimsworth—which is the finer animal?”
I replied quietly: “Compare yourself and Mr. Edward Crimsworth, Mr Hunsden.”
“Oh, Crimsworth is better filled up than I am, I know besides he has a straight nose, arched eyebrows, and all that; but these advantages—if they are advantages—he did not inherit from his mother, the patrician, but from his father, old Crimsworth, who, my father says, was as veritable a ——shire blue-dyer as ever put indigo in a vat yet withal the handsomest man in the three Ridings. It is you, William, who are the aristocrat of your family, and you are not as fine a fellow as your plebeian brother by long chalk.”
There was something in Mr. Hunsden’s point-blank mode of speech which rather pleased me than otherwise because it set me at my ease. I continued the conversation with a degree of interest.
“How do you happen to know that I am Mr. Crimsworth’s brother? I thought you and everybody else looked upon me only in the light of a poor clerk.”
“Well, and so we do; and what are you but a poor clerk? You do Crimsworth’s work, and he gives you wages—shabby wages they are, too.”
I was silent. Hunsden’s language now bordered on the impertinent, still his manner did not offend me in the least—it only piqued my curiosity; I wanted him to go on, which he did in a little while.
“This world is an absurd one,” said he.
“Why so, Mr. Hunsden?”
“I wonder you should ask: you are yourself a strong proof of the absurdity I allude to.”