Here Alice detected Charley giving me, with his off eye, a wink so huge that its corrugations (like waves bursting over a breakwater) scaled the barrier of his nose and betrayed what the other side of his face was at.
Charley ducked his head just in time; and immediately thereafter began a series of dextrous manœuvres among the chairs and other furniture in the room, in evading Alice’s persistent efforts to smooth out some of the wrinkles that wicked wink had wrought. At last he tumbled into his seat rather blown, and with one cheek redder than the other.
Amid such scenes as this has this tale been tacked together. Can the reader wonder at its harum-scarum way of getting itself told? Am I not driving a team of mustangs?
“They are all alike,” puffed Charley; “they love us to distraction, but we must not know it. Go on, my boy.”
I read on amid much hilarity; and it was such reception of this solitary effort of my individual muse that induced me to retain it in the body of the work. At last we came to the passage where occurred the coincidence to which I have alluded.
In my fabulous and starry account of the billing and cooing on the piazza, I make Charley ask, May my heart beat in the frolic rhythm of the scherzo? This—for why should I hide my harmless self-content from my friend, the reader?—this I don’t deny that I thought a very neat and unhackneyed way of asking a girl whether she gave you leave to consider yourself a happy dog. It was my little climax, and—I confess it—my heart fluttered a little as I drew near the passage, in anticipation of the plaudits I trusted to receive.
No clapping of hands. A dead silence, rather; and looking up, I saw my friends staring at one another.
“What’s the matter?” asked I, a little sheepishly. “I rather thought,” I stammered, “that—that that was—not so bad?”
“Mr. Frobisher, I am astonished at you!” [At that period it was not usual for Virginia wives to call their husbands by their Christian names.]
“Indeed, my dear—”