"This must be a rich old chap, this Halfacre, to be able to give his daughter a hundred-dollar pocket-handkerchief, Tom; one might do well to get introduced."
"If you'll take my advice, Ned, you'll keep where you are," was the answer. "You've been to the surrogate's office, and have seen the will of old Simonds, and KNOW that he has left his daughter seventy-eight thousand dollars; and, after all, this pocket-handkerchief may be only a sign. I always distrust people who throw out such lures."
"Oh, rely on it, there is no sham here; Charley Pray told me of this girl last week, when no one had ever heard of her pocket-handkerchief."
"Why don't Charley, then, take her himself? I'm sure, if I had HIS imperial, I could pick and choose among all the second-class heiresses in town."
{imperial = wealth (from a Russian gold coin)}
"Ay, there's the rub, Tom; one is obliged in our business to put up with the SECOND class. Why can't we aim higher at once, and get such girls as the Burtons, for instance?"
"The Burtons have, or have had, a mother."
"And haven't all girls mothers? Who ever heard of a man or a woman without a mother!"
"True, physically; but I mean morally. Now this very Eudosia Halfacre has no more mother, in the last sense, than you have a wet-nurse. She has an old woman to help her make a fool of herself; but, in the way of a mother, she would be better off with a pair of good gum-shoes. A creature that is just to tell a girl not to wet her feet, and when to cloak and uncloak, and to help tear the check-book out of money, is no more of a mother than old Simonds was of a Solomon, when he made that will which every one of us knows by heart quite as well as he knows the constitution."
Here a buzz in the room drew the two young men a little aside, and for a minute I heard nothing but indistinct phrases, in which "removal of deposites," "panic," "General Jackson," and "revolution," were the only words I could fairly understand. Presently, however, the young men dropped back into their former position, and the dialogue proceeded.