“Cut you, my son!” exclaimed Jim’s mother. “Gott in himmel! that Goose cut you indeed!”
“There are not many Goose Girls that wouldn’t have done in the circumstances. But she is True Blue. And I am going to finish her portrait. And I am going to make her permanently famous.”
Jim’s mother tilted the last of the Johannisberg into his glass.
“Go in and win, dear boy,” said she. “You have genius. Lavish it upon her. Earn fame and fortune, and buy back the Red House at Widdiford.”
“And in the meantime,” said Jim, “she will have married that old fossil and borne him three children.”
“She will not, dear boy,” said the voice of the temptress, “if you make her promise not to.”
“Oh, that wouldn’t be cricket,” said Jim, “with her people so miserably poor and James Lascelles by no means affluent; and the old fossil with a house in Piccadilly, and another in Notts, and another in Fifeshire, and a yacht in the Solent, and a box at the Opera, and a mausoleum at Kensal Green. No, old lady, I’m afraid it wouldn’t be cricket.”
Jim’s mother exposed herself to the censure of all self-respecting people.
“It would be far less like cricket,” said she, “for that perfect dear of a Goose to have her youth, her beauty, and her gayety purchased by a worldly old ruffian who ought to be a grandfather. Come, sir, she awaits her very parfit gentil knight.”
But Jim shook his head solemnly.