“Well, Jim,” asked the strapping youth, as he gazed pensively on this prospect, “what d’you think of it?”
“What do you refer to, Bob—our view or the wedding?”
“The wedding, of course.”
“It’s hard to say,” replied Jim, musing. “He seemed to be such an unmitigated scoundrel when we first made his acquaintance that it is difficult to believe he is a changed man now.”
“By which you mean to insinuate, Jim, that the Gospel is not sufficient for out-and-out blackguards; that it is only powerful enough to deal with such modified scoundrels as you and I were.”
“By no means,” replied Jim, with a peculiar smile; “but, d’you know, Bloater, I never can feel that we were such desperate villains as you make us out to have been, when we swept the streets together.”
“Just listen to him!” exclaimed the Bloater, smiting his knee with his fist, “you can’t feel!—what have feelings to do with knowledge? Don’t you know that we were fairly and almost hopelessly in the current, and that we should probably have been swept off the face of the earth by this time if it had not been for that old gentleman with the bald head and the kindly—”
“There, now, Bloater, don’t let us have any more of that, you become positively rabid when you get upon that old gentleman, and you are conceited enough, also, to suppose that all the gratitude in the world has been shovelled into your own bosom. Come, let us return to the point, what do I think of the wedding—well, I think a good deal of it. There is risk, no doubt, but there is that in everything sublunary. I think, moreover, that the marriage is founded on true love. He never would have come to his present condition but for true love to Martha, which, in God’s providence, seems to have been made the means of opening his mind to Martha’s message, the pith of which message was contained in his last remark on leaving the church. Then, as to Martha, our own knowledge of her would be sufficient to ease our minds as to her wisdom, even if it were not coupled with the reply she made to me when I expressed wonder that she should desire to marry such a man. ‘Many waters,’ she said, ‘cannot quench love!’”
“Ha! you know something of that yourself,” remarked Bob with a smile.
“Something,” replied Little Jim, with a sigh.