“Not at all; I have paid this visit, as it might be, professionally.”
“Professionally! I never was better in my life; and set you down as a false prophet, or no doctor, if you like that better, for the gout has not even given a premonitory hint, this spring; and I hope, now I have given up Sauterne altogether, and take but four glasses of Madeira at dinner——”
“Two, too many.”
“I’ll engage to drink nothing but sherry, Ned, if you’ll consent to four, and that without any of those forbidding looks.”
“Agreed; sherry has less acidity, and consequently less gout, than Madeira. But my business here this morning, though professional, does not relate to my craft, but to your own.”[own.”]
“To the law? Now I take another look at you, I do see trouble in your physiognomy; am I not to draw the marriage settlements, after all?”
“There are to be none. The new law gives a woman the entire control of all her property, they tell me, and I suppose she will not expect the control of mine.”
“Umph! Yes, she ought to be satisfied with things as they are, for she will remain mistress of all her cups and saucers, even,—ay, and of her houses and lands, in the bargain. Hang me, if I would ever marry, when the contract is so one-sided.”
“You never did, when the contract was t’other-sided. For my part, Tom, I’m disposed to leave a woman mistress of her own. The experiment is worth the trial, if it be only to see the use she will make of her money.”
“You are always experimenting among the women, and are about to try a third wife. Thank Heaven, I’ve got on sixty years, quite comfortably, without even one.”