“No; nobody in particular. I went in a very quiet way. I had some good letters to people in England, but I didn’t present them. The idea of introductions became a bore as I got nearer to it.”
“And, of course, you didn’t elope with the marquise?”
“Was that in my scheme? Well—no, I did not.”
“You might have done worse, old man. You ought to have a wife, to keep you from getting rusty up here. And, besides, a fellow that goes so much into genealogy should take some interest in posterity. You ought to cultivate the science practically.”
“Oh, I’m past all danger of matrimony now,” said Berkeley, with a laugh. “There was a girl that I was rather sweet on a few years ago. I was looking up a pedigree for her papa, and I found that I was related to her myself, in eight different ways, though none of them very near. I explained it to her one evening. It took me an hour to do it, and I fancy she thought it a little slow. At all events, when I afterward hinted that we might make the eight ways nine, she answered that our relationship was so intricate already that she couldn’t think of complicating it any further. No, you may put me down as safe.”
After this, we sat listening in silence to the distant beat of paddle-wheels where a steamer was moving up river.
“The river is a deal of company,” resumed my host. “Thirty-six steamers pass here every twenty-four hours. That now is the Mary Powell.”
“Well,” I said, answering not so much to his last remark as to the whole trend of his autobiography, “I suppose you are happy in this way of life, since you seem to prefer it. But it would be terribly monotonous to me.”
“Happy?” replied Berkeley, doubtfully. “I don’t know. Happiness is a subjective matter. You are happy if you think yourself so. As for me, I cultivate an obsolete mood—the old-fashioned humor of melancholy. I don’t suppose now that a light-hearted, French kind of chap like you can understand, in the least, what those fine, crusty old Elizabethans meant when they wrote,