“Upon this hint he spake.” His fair one, after assuming all proper and becoming airs upon the occasion, suffered herself to be prevailed upon to call, with her mother and a friend, at Mr. Ludgate’s house in Cranbourne-alley, to see whether it could be possibly inhabited by a lady of her taste and consequence.
As Leonard handed her out of her hackney-coach, she exclaimed, “Bless us, and be we to go up this paved lane, and through the shop, before we can get to the more creditabler apartments?”
“I’m going to cut a passage off the shop, which I’ve long had in contemplation,” replied our hero; “only I can’t get light into it cleverly.”
“Oh! a lamp in the style of a chandaleer will do vastly well by night, which is the time one wants one’s house to put the best foot foremost, for company; and by day we can make a shift, somehow or other, I dare say. Any thing’s better than trapesing through a shop; which is a thing I’ve never been used to, and cannot reconcile myself to by any means.”
Leonard immediately acceded to this scheme of the dark passage by day, and the chandaleer by night; and he hurried his fair one through the odious shop to the more creditabler apartments. She was handed above, about, and underneath. She found every particle of the house wanted modernizing immensely, and was altogether smaller than she could ever have conceived beforehand. Our hero, ambitious at once to show his gallantry, spirit, and taste, incessantly protested he would adopt every improvement Miss Belle Perkins could suggest; and he declared that the identical same ideas had occurred to him a hundred and a hundred times, during his poor father’s lifetime: but he could never make the old gentleman enter into any thing of the sort, his notions of life being utterly limited, to say no worse. “He had one old saw, for ever grating in my ears, as an answer to everything that bore the stamp of gentility, or carried with it an air of spirit: hey, Allen!” continued our hero, looking over his shoulder at a young man who was casting up accounts; “hey, Allen—you remember the old saw?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the young man, “if you mean, ‘Out of debt out of danger:’ I hope I shall never forget it.”
“I hope so too; as you have your fortune to make, it is very proper for you: but for one that has a fortune ready made to spend, I am free to confess I think my principle worth a million of it: and my maxim is, ‘Spend to-day, and spare to-morrow:’ hey, ladies?” concluded Leonard, appealing with an air secure of approbation to his fair mistress and her young companion.
“Why that suits my notions, I must own candidly,” said Belle; “but here’s one beside me, or behind me—Where are you, Lucy?” pursued the young lady, addressing herself to her humble companion: “here’s one, who is more of your shop-man’s way of thinking than yours, I fancy. ‘Out of debt out of danger’ is just a sober saying to your mind, an’t it, Lucy?”
Lucy did not deny the charge. “Well, child,” said Miss Perkins, “it’s very proper, for you have no fortune of your own to spend.”
“It is, indeed,” said Lucy, with modest firmness; “for as I have none of my own, if it were my maxim to spend to-day and spare to-morrow, I should be obliged to spend other people’s money, which I never will do as long as I can maintain myself independently.”