And of course your mother was handsome. How dare you doubt it? Look in the glass and be grateful to her. You know, though you may only have come within the spell of what you so sweetly call my darling brown eyes during the last few weeks, I fell a victim to your darling blue ones in the first five minutes. And how great was my joy when I discovered that your soul so exactly matched your outside. Your mother had blue eyes, too, and was very tall, and had an extraordinarily thoughtful face. Look, I tell you, in the glass, and you'll see she had; for I refuse to believe that your father, a man who talks port wine and tomatoes the whole of the first meal he has with his only son after a year's separation, is the parent you are like. Heavens, how I shake when I think of what will happen when you tell him about me. 'Sir,' he'll say, in a voice of thunder—or don't angry English parents call their sons 'sir' any more? Anyhow, they still do in books—'Sir, you are far too young to marry. Young men of twenty-five do not do such things. The lady, I conclude, will provide the income?
Roger, rushing to the point: She hasn't a pfenning.
Incensed Parent: Pfenning, sir? What, am I to understand she's a German?
Roger, dreadfully frightened: Please.
I.P., forcing himself to be calm: Who is this young person?
Roger: Fräulein Schmidt, of Jena.
I.P., now of a horrible calmness: And who, pray, is Fräulein Schmidt, of Jena?
Roger, pale but brave: The daughter of old Schmidt, in whose house I boarded. Her mother was English. She was a Watson.
I.P.: Sir, oblige me by going to the—
Roger goes.