Aunt Eliza.
[Smiling.] It was a momentous discovery.
Blenkinsop.
No sooner had I made it than I began to cultivate my power of small talk. I felt that my only chance was to be ready with appropriate subjects at the shortest notice, and I spent a considerable part of my last year at Oxford in studying the best masters.
Mrs. Dot.
I never noticed that you were particularly brilliant.
Blenkinsop.
I never played for brilliancy. I played for safety. I flatter myself that when prattle was needed I have never been found wanting. I have met the ingenuity of sweet seventeen with a few observations on Free Trade, while the haggard efforts of thirty have struggled in vain against a brief exposition of the higher philosophy. The skittish widow of uncertain age has retired in disorder before a complete acquaintance with the restoration dramatists, and I have routed the serious spinster with religious leanings by my remarkable knowledge of the results of missionary endeavour in Central Africa. Once a dowager sought to ask me my intentions, but I flung at her astonished head an entire article from the “Encyclopædia Britannica.” These are only my serious efforts. I need not tell you how often I have evaded a flash of the eyes by an epigram or ignored a sigh by an apt quotation from the poets.
Mrs. Dot.
I don’t believe a word you say. I believe you never married for the simple reason that nobody would have you.