“Acting on this idea, I called on these gentlemen in town. They seem to be in a good way of business, fine warehouse, clerks, and all the rest of it; but the men themselves are a pair of ugly yellow devils, with big fat noses. Supposing Mrs. Booth to be a party to an intrigue with one of them, to say the least she has very bad taste. But then I reflected that women are very capricious.”
“Not more than men, I’m sure!”
“And, though the late Mr. Booth was at least in appearance worth half-a-dozen of these German sauerkrauts, yet we have the memorable example of Hamlet’s mother, that ugliness itself is sometimes an attraction to feminine taste.”
“Who was that Mrs. Hamlet? Did she live on the Shore? I never heard of her.”
“No, she is a character in a play.”
“Written by a man, I suppose?”
“Yes; William Shakespeare.”
“That explains it. I knew it would take a man to write foolery like that! And what did those Germans tell you?”
“I could get nothing out of them. They talked like two idiots, so I left them in disgust. But, coming home, and thinking the matter over in my mind, I began to doubt if they had not been acting a part with me to try perhaps to throw me off the scent. Is it likely now, that two dunderheads such as they pretended to be, could successfully carry on a Sydney wholesale business? They tell me, and I have no doubt it’s true, that it takes a man to be as sharp as a razor for that kind of work. And later, when crossing the ferry, I met one of the clerks I had seen in the office, I took the opportunity to pump him in a quiet way about his bosses, and he was not slow to talk.
“‘Are they fond of women!’ said the clerk. ‘Just terrors! I believe it’s all they think about, and they think no small beer of themselves. Why, there’s Jacob, that’s the eldest, to hear him you would think all the girls in Sydney were running after him, and the married women, too. Even this Mrs. Booth they are talking about so much now, he has often said she had made a dead set at him, wanted him to spark her about, and I don’t know what.’