P.S.—Don’t talk about gratitude. Go on making remarkable cures, for the honour of Bart’s. That would be far more pleasing to me than any words.
CLXIII
Richard Haven to Clemency Power
My Dear Miss Power, I enclose a cheque to settle our little account, and if you notice a discrepancy between the amount which you thought was owing and that for which it is made out you must devote the difference to the purchase of a wedding present for Mrs. Bryan Field, who has been such a boon and a blessing in the house of my friend. I shall never cease to be thankful that it was you who accepted the post, for I cannot conceive that even this great world could provide anyone else half so desirable.
May you be very happy with your brilliant husband, and live long, and see him rise from honour to honour. I am glad you are going to marry so soon, because then he will be able to play cricket with his sons.—I am, yours sincerely,
Richard Haven
CLXIV
Horace Mun-Brown to Verena Raby
Dear Aunt,—The news of Hazel’s engagement has prostrated me and also filled me with a kind of despair about life in general. That a lawn-tennis player should, for a permanency, be preferred to a man of ideas is so essentially wrong that one is left gasping. Lawn-tennis is a frivolous capering game for a few fine days in summer and then not again till next year, while ideas go on for ever.
Now that you are so much better again, you will probably be intent upon spending your superfluity in your own way, but I want you to listen to one more project of mine. It will show you too how my mind has been working. You know the old joke about men going out fishing or shooting and expecting to bring trout or game back to their wives, but, through want of sport, having to stop at the fishmonger’s or poulterer’s on their way home? Well, it suddenly occurred to me while I was shaving yesterday that here is the germ of a very successful business. You know how every traveller promises his family or his friends that he will bring back something. If he is going to the East, he generally promises a parrot or a shawl or a string of amber beads. If he is going to Africa, he promises, say, ostrich feathers or assegais. But in any case he promises something and—this is the point—probably forgets, and therefore comes back empty-handed and is in consequence despised. Now, my idea is that great emporiums should be stocked and opened somewhere near the points of disembarkation from abroad. The ships from foreign parts disgorge their passengers at Liverpool or Southampton or London, and I should establish a great bazaar close to the harbour at each spot where everything that had been promised and forgotten could be purchased—parrots, shawls, beads, ostrich feathers, assegais, everything. The returning traveller would see it, his face would brighten, he would dash in and buy and be no longer ashamed or afraid to meet his wife. Don’t you think that a good notion?