"Of course I can do less," he replied garrulously. "I can give him nothing at all, d'ye see; not a brass halfpenny. Look at the ass, maudling about the first pretty face he sees over a dinner table when he might marry money twenty times for the asking of it. Did I make such a fool of myself when I was his age?"
I assured him that he did nothing of the sort.
"Then what's he want to do it for? Thinks he's going to get something out of me, perhaps—out of me, but he ain't—not sixpence; not if they hadn't enough to get to the station with. Ha, ha! I'm not such a spendthrift as I look."
He talked in this strain for some while, and then fell to haggling over a gift. He told me that the custom of giving wedding presents was the insane fashion of an insane age; that he consented to follow it only in view of the fuss that society would make if his card did not lie on Lord Varnley's table when the other presents were shown. In this bargaining he displayed a meanness which was triumphant even for him. I must have shown him quite a hundred rings, pins, and watches, of all values, from fifty pounds to five hundred, before he could in any way make up his mind, and he did not cease to rebuke me for that which he called my preposterously extravagant insinuation. "Fifty sovereigns! a hundred sovereigns!" he kept exclaiming; "Why, man alive, do you think I'm made of money? Show me something cheap, something that five pounds will buy, d'ye see? any bit of stuff's good enough for a jackanapes like that."
"But not for your card on Lord Varnley's table."
"Why, what do you mean?"
"People who are uncharitable, you know, might say that it was a curiously insufficient present."
"D'ye think they'd say that?"
"I am sure they would."
"Pshaw!—so am I; that comes of being thought a rich man when you're as poor as a parson. I'm quite a poor man, you know, Sutton."