“I cannot conceive how it comes about that he was spared.’” Fanny had said. “Oh, I wish he would not do such things!”
“Yes,” agreed her lord. “Though, mind you, he’s very well able to take care of himself.”
“But in the power of a whole crew of smugglers!”
“I expect they liked him.”
“Liked him?”
“Well, you can’t help liking him!” pointed out his lordship. “He’s a very charming fellow—and I wish to God he’d settle down, and stop kicking up these larks!”
“Mama is right!” declared Fanny. “We must find him an eligible wife!”
Candidate after candidate for this post did Fanny and her mama find, and cunningly throw in John’s way. Apparently he liked them—all of them. This one was a most conversible girl, that one seemed to him a very lively girl, another a remarkably pretty girl. But he asked none of them to marry him. When his sister ventured to ask him once if he had ever been in love, he had replied quite seriously, Yes: he rather thought he had been desperately in love with the lodgekeeper’s wife, who used to regale him with brandy-snaps, and allowed him to keep in a hutch outside her kitchen-door the ferrets Mama had so much disliked.
Was that all? had demanded an exasperated sister. No, there had been a girl in Lisbon, when he first joined. Juanita, or was it Conchita? He couldn’t remember, but at all events she was the loveliest creature you ever saw. Dark, of course, and with the biggest eyes, and such a well-turned ankle! Had he been in love with her? “Lord, yes!” replied John. “We all were!”
He admitted that it was time he was thinking of getting married: not, of course, to Fanny, but to Mama. “Well, I know, Mama,” he said apologetically. “But the thing is I’ve got no fancy for one of these dashed suitable marriages, where you don’t really care a fig for the girl, or she for you. I don’t mean to offer marriage to any girl who don’t give me a leveller. So I daresay I shall remain a bachelor, for they don’t—any of ’em! And if one did,” he added thoughtfully, “it’s Lombard Street to a China orange you wouldn’t take to her!”