"Try that chair by the fire, Steve, and comfort your soles on the mantel while I unearth a pair of slippers for you. I've a small mound of them in the closet, built up of the individual gifts of 'grateful pupils.'"
"A cruel waste! You should be a centipede, Hal, instead of that forlorn biped, a bachelor. By the way, speaking of single-blessedness, how it must harrow you, my boy, to witness diurnally the bliss of the bride and bridegroom who sit opposite you here at table! Favor them with Lamb's 'Complaint against Married People,' will you? and send me the bill."
"Bride and bridegroom? Well, that is rich! Have a cigar, deluded youth, while I enlighten you concerning this mellifluous couple. Did you mark the gentleman particularly? You can't take him in at a glance: there's too much of him. Goodwin his name is—Timothy Goodwin: 'Good Timothy' his friends dub him; and the title applies.
"He sat next me at table when I first came to Mrs. Tewksbury's, five years ago, and from the outset he showed a fatherly interest in me—an interest which this quaking stripling of an organist appreciated, I can assure you. Being one of the pillars of St. Luke's—the church I play at, you remember—and an esteemed musical critic withal, his hearty approval of me as a performer was an immense advantage to me.
"You'd hardly suppose such a quiet, imperturbable earthling as he looks to be would rhapsodize over music, would you? It was a surprise to me to find how deeply it moved him. He soon fell into the habit of dropping into my room after tea when he heard me at the piano; and many a time I've caught the great, strong fellow mopping his eyes surreptitiously over affecting passages.
"As I came to know him intimately, and to feel what a staunch, tender-hearted, domestic sort of individual he was, I began to wonder he had never married. One day I asked him in a joking way how a rich man like himself could reconcile it with his conscience to remain a bachelor in America, where there was such a preponderance of unmarried ladies to be supported? He made a wry face, and said he had assumed the maintenance of two spinster step-cousins: wasn't that his part?
"'Or if you think it isn't, Hal, I'll tell you what I'll do,' he added, laughing. 'You marry yourself, and I'll support your wife. Won't that be fair?'
"'Hardly fair for the lady,' I remarked, adding that I should pity the luckless unknown who should thus fail to secure him as her Benedict.
"The idea seemed to amuse him immensely.
"'You kindly insinuate that it would be a benevolence in me to take a wife,' said he with a twinkle in his eye. 'Now, I protest I'm not conceited enough to think that. On the contrary, if a woman should consent to give herself to me, I should consider the benevolence entirely on her side. Can't say I crave such a charity just at present, though,' he added in comic haste, stretching his long arms as if to waive the bequest. 'The fact is, Hal, I've never seen the girl I want. Being hard upon forty, it stands to reason I never shall see her: I fear she died young. May I trouble you to play Beethoven's Funeral March in respect to her memory?'