Mark took it in his hand. Whatever he did, he did sincerely and with care. He held the scarf up to the light; he bent his head over it and scrutinized it through his glasses; then he sniffed at it to see if it had any perfume, and stretched the meshes to see if it were hand-woven. At last he said:
‘I don’t think I know anything about it. It is made of wool, not silk; it is all delicate as a cobweb, but it does not call to my mind any stuff I ever saw. I should say it might have come from the East, possibly from India or even from Greece—Milesian wool.’
‘Yes, Milesian wool—it must be that,’ said Rob, enthusiastically.
‘You are not in earnest when you tell me you do not know anything more about it than I do?’
‘I am in earnest, but I can’t say exactly that; and yet I know nothing about the scarf except how it came to me; you would call me practical, sane—not a dreamer?’
‘Not a dreamer, if by that you mean that you are sufficiently on the earth to know how to live; but you are a mixture. I saw an old tinker yesterday—a tinker and umbrella-mender combined—a little gray tramp of a fellow, about sixty years old, stubby beard, dirty, self-possessed, master of himself and of the world so far as he was concerned in it, with an optimistic vein in spite of some hard luck, and with the most beautiful clear eyes I ever saw. He was a wanderer—a traveller, I might say. He had seen the greater part of America, and understood it, too, and he had seen it all on foot or by means of stolen car-rides. He fairly made me long to travel, with his tales of Colorado; he was immensely interesting. I talked with him for over an hour while he mended my umbrella and put a new ferule on my cane; and all the time, while I was listening to him, I was thinking: “Now, here is my friend Rob, just as he would have been without the mixture”—the mixture being, of course, your scholarly tastes and your money, half-tinker and half-student. I have no doubt but the tinker had tastes, too, but he hadn’t the money.’
‘I like the picture of your tinker.’
‘Yes, you do, that is the trouble; and it’s the tinker part of you that breaks an engagement for a scarf.’
‘What would you have me do—tell Mabel that I am earnest and interesting, and beg her to marry a tinker?’
‘No, I fancy the thing is better as it is; but I hope the scholar will have his chance some day. You are thirty?’