LETTERS TO ABSTRACTIONS.
No. V.—TO GUSH.
MY DEAREST DARLING PERSON,
How sweet and amiable of you to allow a humble being like myself to write to you. Dropping your own special style (which, to be perfectly frank with you, I could no more continue through the whole of this letter than I could dine off treacle and butter-scotch), I beg to say that I am heartily glad to have this opportunity of telling you a few things which have been on my mind for a long time. In what corner of the great realm of abstractions do you make your home? I imagine you whiling away the hours on some soft couch of imitation down, with a little army of sweet but irrelevant smiles ready at all times to do your bidding. You are refined, I am sure. You cultivate sympathy as some men cultivate orchids, until it blooms and luxuriates in the strangest and gaudiest shapes. Your real face is known of no other abstraction; indeed, you never see it yourself, so well-fitted and so constant is the mask through which you waft the endearments which have caused you to be avoided everywhere. This, I admit, is imagination; but is it very far from the truth? Perhaps I ask in vain, for truth is the very last thing that may be expected of you and of those who do your bidding upon earth. I will not, therefore, press the question, but proceed at once to business.
About a month ago I met your friend, ALGERNON JESSAMY. What is there about ALGERNON that inspires such distrust? He is very presentable; some people have gone so far as to call him absolutely good-looking. He is tall, his figure is good, his clothes fit him admirably, and are always speckless; his features are regular, his complexion fresh, and his fair hair, carefully parted in the middle, lies like a smooth and shining lid upon his head. I pass over all his remaining advantages, whether of dress or of nature. It is enough to say that, thus equipped, and with the additional merits of wealth and a good position, ALGERNON ought to have found no difficulty in being one of the most popular men in town. Perhaps he would have been if he had not tried with such a persistent energy to make himself "so deuced agreeable." The phrase is not mine, but that of SAMMY MIGGS, who has a contempt for ALGERNON and his methods, which he never attempts to conceal.
"ALGY, my boy," I have heard him say, while the unfortunate JESSAMY smiled uneasily, and shifted on his seat, "ALGY, my boy, I've known you too long to give in to any of your nonsense. All that butter of yours is wasted here, so you'd better keep it for someone who likes it. Try it on QUISBY," he continued, indicating the celebrated actor, who was at that moment frowning furiously over a notice of his latest performance; "he loves it in firkins, and I'll undertake to say you'll never get to the bottom of his swallowing capacity. You'll have to exhaust even your stock, ALGY, my boy; and that's saying a lot."
So thoroughly uncomfortable did the suave and gentle ALGERNON look, that I afterwards ventured to remonstrate mildly with the gadfly MIGGS.
"What?" he said, "made him uncomfortable, did I? And a jolly good job too. Bless you, I know the beggar through and through. I wasn't at Oxford with him for nothing. Wish I had been. He's the sort of chap who loses no end of I.O.U.'s at cards one night, and when he wins piles of ready the next never offers to redeem them. You let me alone about ALGY. I tell you I know him. There's no bigger humbug in Christendom with all his soft sawder and gas about everybody being the dearest and cleverest fellow he's ever met. Bah!"
And therewith SAMMY left me, evidently smarting under some ancient sore inflicted by the apparently angelic ALGERNON.