“It has been a good deal pleasanter this year than usual,” agreed Usk.
“I admire to see a young man open and candid, sir. Have you got any more acquainted with the Steinherzes yet?”
“You are nothing whatever but a good Inquisitor spoilt! I have seen a certain amount of them.”
“And so far as one of the party is concerned, it’s pretty generally concluded that to see her is to—you know how it goes along? But maybe you are an exception?”
“Really, a man can’t call his innermost feelings his own when you’re anywhere about, Hicks.” Mr Hicks nodded approvingly. “But after all, it was you that introduced me to her, and I’ll make you a present of the information, which you have probably guessed already, that I am going home to have a business talk with my father.”
Mr Hicks nodded again, and Usk, whose tongue seemed to have been loosed by his first admission, went on—
“There are times, you know, when a man feels he has to pay rather dear for the virtues of his family. It’s quite delightful, of course, to know that no landowner in South Wales does more for his tenants than my father, but the worst part of it is that it leaves so awfully little for us to live upon.”
“Don’t go around worrying over that,” said Mr Hicks soothingly. “The good American girl regards it as her mission these days to shore up the tottering British coronet with her dollars.”
“It’s her father I’m thinking of,” lamented Usk. “How can one go to a man and say, ‘Mr Steinherz, I love your daughter, and if you are prepared to hand her over rather more millions than I have hundreds a year, I daresay we shall get on very comfortably’?” Miss Steinherz’s prospective fortune was understood, be it remarked, to be of such satisfactory dimensions as to suffer no appreciable diminution even by reduction to English figures.
“If that’s all,” was the dry reply, “you can just go right away to J. Bertram Steinherz, and say those identical words. Why, sir, your request is real moderate. I guess an ordinary French or German count would have his father-in-law hand over that same pile of dollars, and rebuild his family castle, and take his crown out of pawn as well, before he would conclude to make a trade. Then he would invite the bride to embrace his religion, and when everything was fixed up according to his notions, he would intimate to the father-in-law that, much as he respected him as a dollar-grinding machine, he guessed he would be conscious of more real, whole-souled pleasure in the partnership if he could regard him as a fixture in the States for the future.”