‘You might,’ murmured Sampson tenderly, ‘if you had as much sympathy with my ideas as I have with yours.’
‘Nonsense!’ cried Celia. ‘What sympathy can there be between you and me? We haven’t an idea in common. A business man like you, with his mind wholly occupied by leases and draft agreements and wills and writs and things, and a girl who doesn’t know an iota of law.’
‘That’s just it!’ exclaimed Sampson. ‘A man in my position wants a green spot in his life—a haven from the ocean of business—an o—what’s its name—in the barren desert of legal transactions. I want a home, Miss Clare—a home!’
‘How can you say so, Mr. Sampson? I am sure you have a very comfortable house, and a model housekeeper in your sister.’
‘A young woman may be too good a housekeeper, Miss Clare,’ answered Sampson seriously. ‘My sister is a little over-conscientious in her housekeeping. In her desire to keep down expenses she sometimes cuts things a little too fine. I don’t hold with waste or extravagance—I shudder at the thought of it—but I don’t like to be asked to eat rank salt butter on a Saturday morning because the regulation amount of fresh has run out, and Eliza won’t allow another half-pound to be had in till Saturday afternoon. That’s letting a virtue merge into a vice, Miss Clare.’
‘Poor Miss Sampson. It is quite too good of her to study your purse so carefully.’
‘So it is, Miss Clare,’ answered the solicitor doubtfully, ‘but I see ribbons round Eliza’s neck, and bonnets upon Eliza’s head, that I can’t always account for satisfactorily to myself. She has a little income of her own, as you no doubt know, since everybody knows everything at Hazlehurst, and she has made her little investments in cottage property out of her little income, which, as you may also know, is derived from cottage property, and she has added a cottage here and a cottage there, till she is swelling out into a little town, as you may say—well, I should think she must have five-and-twenty tenements in all—and I sometimes ask myself how she manages to invest so much of her little income, and yet to dress so smart. There isn’t a better-dressed young lady in Hazlehurst—present company, of course, excepted—than my sister. You may have noticed the fact.’
‘I have,’ replied Celia, convulsed with inward laughter. ‘Her bonnets have been my admiration and my envy.’
‘No, Miss Clare, not your envy,’ protested Sampson, with exceeding tenderness. ‘You can envy no one. Perfection has no need to envy. It must feel its own superiority. But I was about to observe, in confidence, that I would rather the housekeeping money was spent on butter than on bonnets; and that when I feel myself deprived of any little luxury, it is a poor consolation to know that my self-denial will provide Eliza with a neck ribbon. No, my dear Miss Clare, the hour must come when my sister will have to give up the keys of her cupboards at The Laurels, and retire to a home of her own. She is amply provided for. There will be no unkindness in such a severance. You know the old proverb, “Two is company, three is none.” It doesn’t sound grammatical, but it’s very true. When I marry, Eliza will have to go.’
‘But you are not thinking of matrimony yet awhile, I hope, Mr. Sampson?’