"My opinion of women is not enhanced by my morning's correspondence," he reflected cynically, during the course of his reading; "could one have believed there were so many silly women in the world—or so many plain ones?" and with a short laugh he picked up two photographs, and looked with scornful scrutiny at the wholly unattractive features of the ladies of uncertain age, and quite certain lack of beauty. Before he had waded half through the packet of letters, his table was strewn with his correspondence, and the look on his face was one, which, as his best friends would have known, indicated no amiable frame of mind.
"Domesticated." "Would make a lonely man intensely happy." "Only long for a quiet home such as you suggest."
"Such as I suggest—I!" Mernside looked wildly round him. "Do I appear to be in search of a quiet home?" he exclaimed, apostrophising the pictures on the walls; "do I want a domesticated female? 'Am considered pretty'—oh, are you, my good young woman? You can't write a civilised letter, that's certain. 'I have a slender income of my own—amply sufficient for my modest wants—but I gather you do not require a fortune with the lady—only a companion for your loneliness.'
"A fortune with the lady? I don't require the lady, thank you," Rupert soliloquised, picking, out sentences from the letters as he read them, and flung them one by one upon the pile. "'I have been lonely for so long myself, that I can fully understand what a lonely man feels. I am no longer in my first youth, but I have a heart overflowing with tenderness. Your happiness would be my first, my only care, etc., etc.'
"Pshaw—what tommy rot!
"'All my friends say I am cheerful. I have often been called a little ray of sunshine'"—Rupert lay back in his chair, and shouted with sudden laughter. "'I would make your home a heaven of bliss.'"
"Oh! Good lord! Good lord!" quoth the unhappy reader, "who in heaven's name has played this confounded practical joke upon me? And what am I to do with these abominable letters and photographs? I should like to burn the lot!—but oh! hang it all, the silly women have taken some rotten hoax for earnest, and"—he paused, as though struck by a sudden recollection, then bounced out of his chair with a good round expletive.
"That young ass, Jack Layton! I'll take my oath he was at the bottom of this tomfoolery. Wasn't he reading some matrimonial humbug out of—wait!—by Jove! it was the Sunday Recorder," and without more ado, Mernside strode across the room and rang the bell.
"Get me a copy of the Sunday Recorder of the day before yesterday, at once," he said curtly, when Courtfield appeared. As soon as the man had vanished, he returned to the table, gathered up the letters he had read, and thrust them into the bureau near the fireplace; and by the time Courtfield came back with the paper in his hand, his master was decorously eating a poached egg, and deliberately opening the nineteenth or twentieth letter of his morning mail.
There was little deliberation in his movements when, alone once more, he feverishly turned the pages of the Sunday Recorder, until his eyes fell on the words, "Matrimonial Bureau." Yes—there it was. The wretched thing seemed to leap into sight as though it were alive, and to his disordered vision the lines appeared to be twice the size of the ordinary print.