“Remarkably,” replied George, tenderly stroking his right knee in an absent manner. “Why, don't you think I walked half the way home from my office the other day when my carriage was late?”
“I wonder you dared venture it,” said Jessie, with a shocked air. “What if you had met with some accident!”
“That's what my son said,” answered George. “He made me promise never to try such a thing again; but I like to show them occasionally that I'm good for something yet.”
He said this with a “he, he,” of senile complacency, ending in an asthmatic cough, which caused some commotion in the company. Frank got up and slapped him on the back, and Mary sent Annie for a glass of water.
George being relieved, and quiet once more restored, Henry said to Frank:—
“By the way, doctor, I want to congratulate you on your son's last book. You must have helped him to the material for so truthful a picture of American manners in the days when we were young. I fear we have not improved much since then. There was a simplicity, a naturalness in society fifty years ago, that one looks in vain for now. There was, it seems to me, much less regard paid to money, and less of morbid social ambition. Don't you think so, Mrs. Tyrrell?”
“It's just what I was saying only the other day,” replied Nellie. “I'm sure I don't know what we 're coming to nowadays. Girls had some modesty when I was young,” and she shook her head with its rows of white curls with an air of mingled reprobation and despair.
“Did you attend Professor Merryweather's lecture last evening, Mrs. Hyde?” asked Frank, adjusting his eye-glasses and fixing Jessie with that intensity of look by which old persons have to make up for their failing eyesight. “The hall was so near your house, I did n't know but you would feel like venturing out.”
“My daughters insisted on my taking advantage of the opportunity, it is so seldom I go anywhere of an evening,” replied Jessie, “and I was very much interested, though I lost a good deal owing to the carrying on of a young couple in front of me. When I was a girl, young folks didn't do their courting in public.”
Mary had not heard of the lecture, and Frank explained that it was one of the ter-semi-centennial course on American society and politics fifty years ago.