"That's very much what papa says," I answered. "He affirms that he never searched into an injurious report in his own parish without finding it so nearly false as to deprive it of all right to go about."
"Besides," said Roger, "look at that face! How I should like to model it.
She's a good woman that, depend upon it."
I was delighted with his enthusiasm.
"I wish you would ask her again, as soon as you can," said Percivale, who always tended to embody his conclusions in acts rather than in words. "Your cousin Judy is a jolly good creature, but from your father's description of her as a girl, she must have grown a good deal more worldly since her marriage. Respectability is an awful snare."
"Yes," said Roger; "one ought to be very thankful to be a Bohemian, and have nothing expected of him, for respectability is a most fruitful mother of stupidity and injustice."
I could not help thinking that he might, however, have a little more and be none the worse.
"I should be very glad to do as you desire, husband," I said, "but how can I? I haven't learned where she lives. It was asking Judy for her address once more that brought it all out. I certainly didn't insist, as I might have done, notwithstanding what she told me; but, if she didn't remember it before, you may be sure she could not have given it me then."
"It's very odd," said Roger, stroking his long mustache, the sole ornament of the kind he wore. "It's very odd," he repeated thoughtfully, and then paused again.
"What's so very odd, Roger?" asked Percivale.
"The other evening," answered Roger, after yet a short pause, "happening to be in Tottenham Court Road, I walked for some distance behind a young woman carrying a brown beer-jug in her hand—for I sometimes amuse myself in the street by walking persistently behind some one, devising the unseen face in my mind, until the recognition of the same step following causes the person to look round at me, and give me the opportunity of comparing the two—I mean the one I had devised and the real one. When the young woman at length turned her head, it was only my astonishment that kept me from addressing her as Miss Clare. My surprise, however, gave me time to see how absurd it would have been. Presently she turned down a yard and disappeared."