“Yes; doosed handsome gerwuls,” agreed Sir Com, “and vewy agweeable, but know too much.”
“Not exactly in your line then, eh?”
“I’m weelly a little afwaid of them,” admitted the valiant youth. “But the dark one is a wegular stunner for eyes and hair. The fair one is Miss Clara Waddie. The bwunette is her friend, Diana,” and the pinkling’s cheeks became all suffused with his ingenuous heart’s blood.
“Ah,” said Granby, observing the suffusion, “so that goddess—and she is a goddess—has transfixed you! Beware how you trifle with her; these American ladies do not hesitate to call a man out. Your Diana is divine, but your Clara is angelic. Waddy? I have a friend of that name. I’m going now to meet him in Boston.”
In the course of the day, Major Granby, who had a soldier-like impetuosity in assaulting new opportunities, was presented to Waddie père and by him to the ladies.
Mr. Waddie of New York was a tall, slender gentleman, clean-shaven and high-cravatted. A bit of white collar on each side narrowed his range of chin movement. Dignity required that his head should not gyrate, hence sidelong glances were only effected by a painful twist of his eyes. He wore a blue frock, buttoned, and remarkably perfect boots. His manner was a little stiff, but entirely well-bred, and had a certain careful courtesy very attractive. Altogether, you would say, a man of limited, but not narrow mind, gentle and amiable. His passion was genealogy, and if he was ever querulous, it was when inevitable antiquaries connected him with the first Waddy, well known to all American pedigrees, cook of the Mayflower and victim of Miles Standish.
“Do I look,” he would say, “like the son of a sea-cook, even in the sixth generation?”
And, indeed, he did not resemble a descendant of the caboose, but rather a marquis of the Émigration, such as we behold him at the Théâtre Français. This somewhat faded élégant had another passion: it was for his lovely daughter; nor was he the only man thus affected.
Mrs. Waddie was wifely, motherly, and a little over-energetic, as became the spouse of so mild and unpractical a gentleman. It was she who devised and carried out that purchase of real estate by which their comfortable property became a handsome fortune. It was she who officered the campaign which ended in giving him the civic crown of Member of Congress, and when the bad cookery of the American snob’s paradise had impaired his health and compelled his resignation, it was again his energetic wife who suggested to General Taylor that she wished the embassy to Florence. It was obtained, of course, and was one of the most creditable acts of that President’s brief career. His successor did not venture to recall Mr. Waddie, although he knew the scorn with which that gentleman, usually so amiable, regarded those ridiculously unsuccessful makeshifts and cowardly compromises of 1850. Mr. Waddie’s fortune, high social position, formidable wife, his serene worth and merited popularity, made him a person whom an accidental President could not presume to offend; and if he were already an enemy, at least it were wiser to keep him in a foreign land.
So his wife and the ambassador remained at Florence, where her balls crushed the Grand Duke’s. She instituted a subscription for fronting the Duomo and introduced into Florentine life Buckwheat Cakes, Veracity, and Sewing Machines—of which only the first-named are still popular in that beautiful city.