“If it’s Jim and Miss Trescott you mean, I wish the affair well,” said I. “I’m quite charmed with her.”
“Well,” said Alice, “from the standpoint of most men, Miss Hinckley isn’t to be left out of the reckoning in such matters. What a face and figure she has! Miss Addison is too prudish and churchified; but I like Miss Hinckley.”
“Yes,” said I; “but Miss Trescott seems, somehow, to have been known to one, in some tender and touching relation. There’s that about her which appeals to one, like some embodiment of the abstract idea of woman. That’s why one feels as if he had risked his life for her, and protected her, and seen her suffer wrong, and all that—”
“That’s only because of that affair you told me of,” said my wife. “Since I’ve seen her, I’ve made up my mind that you misconstrued the matter utterly. There was really nothing to it.”
In a week I wrote to Mr. Elkins, accepting his proposal, and promising to close up my affairs, remove to Lattimore, and join with him.
“I do not feel myself equal to playing the part of either Romulus or Remus in founding your new Rome,” I wrote; “but I think as a writer of fire-insurance policies, and keeping the office work up, I may prove myself not entirely a deadhead. My wife asks how the breathing-spaces for the populace are coming on?”
And the die was cast!
CHAPTER VII.