“He does not resemble at all the typical nabob,” observed Diana. “He is not fat and curry-coloured. He does not wear yellow slippers and Madras cravats and queer white clothes of the last cycle. He sits a morning with us and does not ask for ale. He doesn’t call lunch tiffin. In fact, if he did not have a Chinese servant and smoke an immense number of cheroots, one could scarcely observe anything in which he differs from other men of the world.”
“How much Chin Chin looks like Julia Wilkes’s friends, Mr. Cutus and Mr. Fortisque,” said Clara.
“Those two unfortunate youths, with chop-stick legs, no perceptible moustache, complexions de foie gras?” and Belden laughed. “The bohoys call them Shanghais. They are indeed changeling Chinese—not quite men. There is in South America one variety of monkey that has a moustache—most have not—they have not.”
“Why does Julia allow such amorphous objects to be perpetually before her?” asked Diana.
“They have surrounded her,” Clara replied. “She is very good-natured and not very wise. One of them is always standing sentinel. I suppose no clever man likes to have a sprightly fool forever standing by and filling vacancy with smiling dumminess while he is talking. So the clever men have actually been thrust away from poor Julia by these two pertinacious friends.”
“Very different from your two civilised California friends,” said Belden, still in a complimentary vein.
“Did you know them in California?” asked Diana.
“No; I was in San Francisco. They were up the country. They were well known from their efficiency in relieving the starved emigration of ’49, and from the very active part they took [G— d—n them!] in making California a free State.”
Belden went on commending judiciously the friends, whom he hated on general principles and found in his way at present. He relieved himself by internal salvos of cursing and achieved his object of buttering all his antagonists, so that he could slip by, as he hoped, and win the prize. He must win. Yes. Or what?
“How handsomely he spoke of Paulding and Dunstan,” said Clara, after he had gone. “I must learn to think better of a man who has the rare virtue of not being jealous.”