"I shall never marry for money, Jim, you may depend upon that."
"Bah, bah, black sheep," said Jim. "Who is talking about marrying for money? A fine girl is none the worse for fifty thousand dollars, and I can give you a list of twenty that you can go round among until you fall in love, and not come amiss anywhere, if it's falling in love that you want to do."
"Oh, come, Jim," said I, "do finish your toilet and be off with yourself if you are going. I don't blame a woman who marries for money, since the whole world has always agreed to shut her out of any other way of gaining an independence. But for a man, with every other avenue open to him, to mouse about for a rich wife, I think is too dastardly for anything."
"That would make a fine point for a paragraph," said Jim, turning round to me, with perfect good humor. "So I advise you to save it for the moral part of the paper. You see, if you waste too much of that sort of thing on me, your mill may run low. It's a deuced hard thing to keep the moral agoing the whole year, you'll find."
"Well," said I, "I am going to try to make a home for a wife, by good, thorough work, done just as work ought to be done; and I have no time to waste on society in the meanwhile."
"And when you are ready for her," said Jim, "I suppose you expect to receive her per 'Divine Providence' Express, ticketed and labeled, and expenses paid. Or, may be she'll be brought to you some time by genii, as the Princess of China was brought to the Prince of Tartary, when he was asleep. I used to read about that in the Arabian tales."
I give this little passage of my conversation with Jim, because it is a pretty good illustration of the axiom, that "It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps." When we have announced any settled purpose or sublime intention, in regard to our future course of life, it seems to be the delight of fortune to throw us directly into circumstances in which we shall be tempted to do what we have just declared we never will do, and the fortunes of our lives turn upon the most inconsiderable hinges.
Mine turned upon an umbrella.
The next morning I had business in the very lowermost part of the city, and started off without my umbrella; but being weather-wise, and discerning the face of the sky, I went back to my room and took it. It was one of those little pet objects of vertu, to which a bachelor sometimes treats himself in lieu of domestic luxuries. It had a finely-carved handle, which I bought in Dieppe, and which caused it to be peculiar among all the umbrellas in New York.
It was one of those uncertain, capricious days that mark the coming in of April, when Nature, like a nervous beauty, doesn't seem to know her own mind, and laughs one moment and cries the next with a perplexing uncertainty.