“Perhaps so,” replied Susan promptly, “for if Mr. Jones was married him might have all his wife’s old relations wanting to live on him.”
“It’s not a matter of relations,” said Jones, “for when I put me hand into me pocket, I can always find money there to help anybody. But females are not to be trusted; and as I don’t take away anybody’s wife, I wouldn’t like anybody to take away mine.”
“I agree wid you, Mister Jones,” said Mr. Proudleigh; “but you don’t have no occasion to worry you’self, for as you not married, nobody can teck away you’ wife.” He laughed as he ceased, being proud of his logic.
“Well, marriage is not everything,” said Susan; “but as I hear that Mr. Jones was goin’ to get married—I forget who tell me—I thought I would mention it so as to congratulate him. But since it isn’t true, I congratulate him all de same.”
“I thank you kindly,” said Jones with a sweeping bow, “and without indulging in any process of vituperation, I venture to submit that some people would have a better life with Samuel Josiah Jones than with other men I could mention. Some married people have it dull, you know. Now I am a sport, an’ anybody who is along with me must enjoy themself.”
Susan immediately credited her aunt with having been talking about her to Jones. Her suspicions were just. Yet Jones had said enough to indicate that he was still regretting her desertion of him, and this established a sympathetic understanding between them: they were both partners in misfortune.
“What that word, ‘vituperation,’ mean, Mister Jones?” inquired Mr. Proudleigh, who was interested in polysyllables but sometimes found that Jones’s terms left him bewildered in a maze of hopeless conjecture.
“It means,” said Jones, beginning an explanation which might have left the old man no wiser than before, when a shout in the street attracted their attention, and they heard a babble of voices and the sound of hurrying feet.
“Fire!” cried Mr. Proudleigh, moving quickly towards the veranda. “What a place Colon is for fire! Almost every week dere is one.”
“They say the American doctors burn down the houses when they can’t cure the fever any other way,” said Jones, hurriedly following Mr. Proudleigh to the veranda.