Looking upon such persons, we know intuitively that they have always had the best of everything, beginning from their cradle, the best of its kind.
Not always strong, these thoroughbred faces are generally attractive. The one before us possesses both strength and beauty. We may consider it foremost among his first-rate advantages.
Seeing this huge monster of humanity bearing down upon them, slow-wabbling, like a proboscidian mammal, fast-puffing, like a steam locomotive, the young man lifted himself to a sitting posture, and without any suspicion as to the true state of the case, remarked to his companion:
“Here comes a doughty old customer, upon my word! ‘What tempest, I trow, threw this whale with so many tons of oil’——”
The young lady cleared her throat—she cleared it point-blankly.
“Excuse me, but, perhaps you do not know, that is—is—my father.”
Stammering forth these words, she at the same time turned very red in the face.
This was slightly awkward, or would have been to another. As for this young man, he did not mind a little thing like that.
“I did not know it,” he told the girl, unruffled; “I crave your pardon. The fact is, it is an habitual failing of mine to make sport of fat people. The lubberly clumsiness of a huge corporation of human flesh is to me so irresistibly comic! My mother tells me a dreadful day of retribution is coming—a day, wherein I shall be fifty and fat, and a fit subject for the ridicule of others.”
“I cannot discern the foreshadows of such a day,” replied the girl, glancing with unconscious approbation at the admirable outlines of a figure whose proportions were well-nigh faultless. She fingered nervously at her bonnet-strings, smiled a panic-stricken little smile, broke out into a cold sweat of fearful expectation, and through all the horrors of the situation, tried her best to emulate the young man’s inimitable air of cultured composure. He got up at this juncture from the ground, not hastily, not awkwardly, but in his own time and at his own pleasure, and standing there, entirely at his ease, looked every inch the living exemplar of that expressive little phrase—“don’t-care.”