Of course Juggins fell in love again. People always do. And at any rate by this time he was in a state of moral fitness that made it imperative.
So he fell in love—deeply in love this time—with a charming girl, commonly known as the eldest Miss Thorneycroft. She was only called eldest because she had five younger sisters; and she was very poor and awfully clever and trimmed all her own hats. Any man, if he's worth the name, falls in love with that sort of thing at first sight. So, of course, Juggins would have proposed to her; only when he went to the house he met her next sister: and of course she was younger still; and, I suppose, poorer: and made not only her own hats but her own blouses. So Juggins fell in love with her. But one night when he went to call, the door was opened by the sister younger still, who not only made her own blouses and trimmed her own hats, but even made her own tailor-made suits. After that Juggins backed up from sister to sister till he went through the whole family, and in the end got none of them.
Perhaps it was just as well that Juggins never married. It would have made things very difficult because, of course, he got poorer all the time. You see after he sold out his last share in his last business he bought with it a diminishing life annuity, so planned that he always got rather less next year than this year, and still less the year after. Thus, if he lived long enough, he would starve to death.
Meantime he has become a quaint-looking elderly man, with coats a little too short and trousers a little above his boots—like a boy. His face too is like that of a boy, with wrinkles.
And his talk now has grown to be always reminiscent. He is perpetually telling long stories of amusing times that he has had with different people that he names.
He says for example—
"I remember a rather queer thing that happened to me in a train one day——"
And if you say—"When was that Juggins?"—he looks at you in a vague way as if calculating and says,—"in 1875, or 1876, I think, as near as I recall it—"
Meanwhile he had become a quaint-looking elderly man.