“Certainly,” said Jericho; “what do you want, Sabilla, my dear?”
Let us endeavour to explain this mutual familiarity. The truth is, in a very soft moment Jericho had murmured to his wife this honey-sweet intelligence—He knew no bounds to his wealth! Whereupon, with a responsive burst of sympathy, Mrs. Jericho declared that, in such case, she saw no end to his greatness. We have said that Mrs. Jericho was a woman of great imagination. Instantaneously she beheld herself upon the topmost peak of the Mountains of Millions; whose altitude is just ten thousand thousand times higher than the Mountains of the Moon. So high that the biggest pearls in the very oldest coronets appeared to Mrs. Jericho no bigger than mustard-seed. With boundless riches she instantly felt boundless ambition. Mrs. Jericho had ever made her best curtsey to the power of wealth: but with the unexpected Plutus as her guest, she was suddenly rapt, sublimated. The Lady Macbeth of a money-box.
“Solomon,”—never until his day of riches had even his own wife called him Solomon—“make haste: you are wanted. Something very particular—a great proposal—vital to us—all we could wish.”
“Who is it, my dear? What’s it about?” asked Jericho with dull composure.
“I have already told you,”—said Mrs. Jericho in a deep, organ note—“that you may fill the world. You shall fill it.” Jericho rubbed his chin; then—he could not help it—looked askance upon the all-wide, cast-off waistcoat. “Make haste, and meet me in the drawing-room.” Saying this, Mrs. Jericho, in all her natural pomp, departed.
Whilst Jericho finishes his toilette, making really the most of himself, let us proceed to the drawing-room. Miss Agatha Pennibacker never looked prettier: she is neatly, gracefully attired in morning muslin web; and stands for the moment looking down with full eyes upon the cup of a flower, into which, with pouting lips, she idly blows. And who could think that that little flower should reflect such a rosy flush upon the face of Agatha? Perhaps, however, it is not all the flower: it may be, that the presence of Sir Arthur Hodmadod, who stands some way apart, half twirling a chair in the hollow of one hand, and with a smile showing all his line teeth to the simple Agatha,—perhaps, the baronet has at least a share of the blush with the scarlet anemone.
“I am delighted to hear, my dear madam, that you suffered no fatigue—took no cold,” very tenderly observes the baronet—“beauty is a jewel—when I say a jewel, of course I mean a flower—that sometimes suffers from the night.”
“But, Sir Arthur—it was so fine, you recollect! Do you not remember the brilliancy of the moon that, you observed, looked like a new nun that had just taken the veil; and surely—can you forget”—asks the emphatic Agatha—“the beautiful compliment you paid to the stars?”
“I assure you, now, that’s just like me—I do,” replies the modest man. “Haven’t a notion.”
“Oh, you said—I recollect it so well,” says the earnest creature, raising her liquid eyes—“you said that the stars were the diamonds of the poor.”