"What little there is, is entirely a genuine article."
CHAPTER XXXII A PAINFUL DUTY
It is all very fine for those fine people who can carry on like that. My sister Grace gave ten thoughts to every pound of her own butter, for one she could spare to every thousand pounds of Stoneman's money. A great weight of cash hung against him at first, in the scales of honest affection; but goodness, and kindness, and manly conduct, and bashfulness—thriving rather shyly in "the House" perhaps, but sprouting more freely in our fine air—had gone down plump against the adverse weight of a metal which we seldom find too heavy. Yet people should keep their felicity quiet; even as a cat (whose name may be akin to it) should purr before the fire, instead of squealing on the chimney-pot.
But Jackson went aloft, and began to look down upon me, to whom he owed everything, as he surely must have known. He chaffed me about my Oriental Princess, a subject not only too lofty for him, but exceedingly painful to me just now. For I felt myself out in the cold, as it were; and with all due allowance for exalted spirits, there is such a thing as good taste; and there is, or ought to be, such a thing as sympathy. And the deeper a man is down in the hole of love, the more should the fellow at the top desire, and strive (without hooking him in the back) to wind him up to bank again. However, I never let them hear a groan, but endeavoured to content myself by meditating on the comparative grandeur of my own position.
Grace was all pity, and flutter, and excitement, and very tender interest about my state of mind, and laid down the law, like the Lord Chief-Justice in some very complicated Liquidation-suit. But when I said to her point-blank, "Very well; as you have it all so clear, let me drive you in mother's pony-trap; and then you will make it all right for me with Sûr Imar, and with Dariel," to my great disgust her answer was, "I am quite ready, George—if dear Jack thinks it proper."
"Dear Jack, indeed!" I replied with undisguised contempt, for Stoneman had persuaded her to drop the "son"; or perhaps she had made him his own father. At any rate, they had found out between them that "Jack" was of higher rank among the novelists than his offspring had as yet attained. However that might be, he was her Jack-of-all trades now; and I, who once did everything, must be proud of second fiddle.