“Too many people in Richmond for me.”
“It seems to me that you like some of them a good deal. Isn’t she bright?”
“P-p-p-pass me the tobacco.” He filled his pipe very deliberately and walked across the room. “Where do you keep your matches? Ah, here they are. Who,” added he, striking one—“puff—do you—puff, puff—think so—puff, puff, puff—bright? Confound the thing!—puff—puff—it has gone out!” And he struck another. Lighting his pipe, and throwing himself upon a lounge, he looked the picture of content.
“Say, old boy,” said I, “own up. Those hazel eyes—”
“Do you know, Jack-Whack” (whenever he called me that he was in the best possible humor), “that you are making a howling ass of yourself?” And he shot a pillar of smoke straight towards the ceiling, following its eddying curves with contemplative eyes.
“‘Howling ass’ is a mixed metaphor.”
“Yes, but an unmixed truth, my boy. Did it ever occur to you, Jack,” said he, removing the Powhatan pipe, with its reed-root stem, from his lips, “that cigars are essentially vulgar? You never thought of it? But they are. So are dress-coats. You have only to put them into marble to see it. Look at the statue of Henry Clay in the Square. Was ever anything so absurd! Posterity will inevitably regard Henry as an ass.”
“Of the howling variety?”
“Of course. Now, just picture to yourself Phidias’ Jove with a cigar stuck into his mouth.”
Charley shot upwards a circling wreath of smoke, watched it till it dissipated itself, and then turned his head, with a little jerk, towards me: “H’m? How would the Olympian Zeus look with a Parian Partaga between his ambrosial lips?”