“So kind of you to take so much trouble, and so sweet of your sister to let me have her carriage. I expect that the mistake was mine.” Though, considering the care she had taken to particularise the vehicle which I was to enter, I did not see how that could be, but that was by the way. “If I may intrude.”
I proceeded to descend. My ancient companion endeavoured to stop me.
“My dear young lady, don’t leave me—only too delighted—take you anywhere!” Then he descended to the vernacular, altogether oblivious of the solemn truth that the fact of his having nearly, if not quite, attained to the Psalmist’s span should have induced him to pay some regard to the proprieties. “It’s hard lines your throwing me over like this—uncommonly hard lines—especially considering the row I’m booked for anyhow. I don’t call it a ladylike thing to do!”
His notions of what was, and of what was not, a ladylike thing to do were probably so distinctly his own that they could hardly be expected to interest me. At any rate, they did not. I just crossed over to the brown man’s sister’s carriage, and left him to formulate—I believe that is the proper word, but if not I cannot help it—his views on ladies and things at his leisure.
It was an odd sensation passing from one brougham to the other. Broughams with us are represented by vehicles from the livery stables. People sometimes, indeed often, take mamma and the girls in their broughams; but no one, since I was the merest child, ever betrayed the slightest desire to take me—not even to play the part of gooseberry. This unwonted actual anxiety to place absolutely charming conveyances at my disposal was most refreshing—to say no more. I had already been in a private omnibus—which, after all, was not so bad; in that bad old man’s wife’s carriage—which was a pet; and now I was in the most scrumptious little vehicle you could possibly imagine—and all in the course of a single evening. If I progressed at this rate I might find myself riding in the Lord Mayor’s coach before I went to bed.
Before many moments had elapsed, however, it began to dawn upon me that, so far as company was concerned, from certainly one point of view, I might not have made an altogether felicitous exchange. The brown man moved in seven-league boots. Compared to the rapidity of his advance, my previous companion had merely stumbled along. But then, of course, he was very much older.
We had been bowling along in silence, and I was beginning to wonder if I could possibly be in for a Quaker’s meeting, when my new companion put an end to any fears I might have had on that point by saying, in the calmest voice in the world, the sort of voice in which he would have referred to the possibility of a shower of rain:
“I wonder if we can get married in the morning.”
I jumped, not boisterously, perhaps, but I certainly did jump.
“I beg your pardon?” I observed.