“At all events,” said my aunt, “you can always come here if you don’t find your quarters comfortable. Your landlady was recommended to me by our laundress, who is a very respectable woman; Conny and I inspected your rooms, before taking them, and they seem pretty comfortable. They are very clean, which is a great thing in lodgings.”
I looked at Conny, who was watching me; her eyes fell when mine met them. There seemed a little more keenness and slyness in their glance than I should have thought such innocent, maidenly, tender, blue eyes capable of. But oh, Eugenio! what is there more deceitful in life than a pretty girl? Does thy heart bleed? Mine has bled. I have tried to pick a rose, and have pulled away nothing but four fingers and a thumb stuffed with thorns.
“You will dine with us to-day,” said my uncle. “Afterwards, James shall drive you to your quarters. There is no need to go to work before Monday. You can pass the rest of the week in looking about you, and sending home your impressions to my brother, the major, who I daresay will be anxious to know how you like the place.”
“Your kindness,” I answered, “will give me plenty to tell him about.”
“My dear boy, we promise to do our best to make you happy,” said my uncle effusively. “I can assure you, it gives me great pleasure to be of service to you and my brother. He ought to have applied to me before. Had you begun this sort of work ten years ago, you might have owned a bank of your own by this time. But it’s never too late to begin, is it?” and here he smiled, and I smiled, and my aunt smiled, and my sweet little cousin laughed a little harping treble, soft as the notes of a flute heard on the water at midnight. “This is very promising,” thought I.
My aunt then told her husband to take me upstairs; it was nearly five, and dinner would soon be ready. So I followed my uncle to a bed-room, and there, as I brushed my hair and curled my mustache, I wondered what sort of an impression I had made on my relations. I thought of my father’s advice, and wished I knew how to be as magnificent as he. He had often told me that his brothers had a very high respect for him, and considered him the prop and decoration of the family name. I thought this quite likely. People in business do respect professional relations. Profit and purple are a fine combination; and if Mr. Scrip knows that her ladyship would call upon Mrs. Scrip, were she to hear that the Dean was Mrs. Scrip’s brother, why shouldn’t Scrip brag of the parson, and combine social dignity with his remunerative pursuits in Throgmorton Street? I lamented my inability to imitate my father’s lordliness, for then I might have profited by my relations’ pride in him, and provoked deference, and even awe, by repeating in myself those swelling qualities and overtopping characteristics which rendered my father among his acquaintance an object of admiration and reverence. It is an old saying, that the world will always take you at your own price. Cast your eyes around you, Eugenio, and mark the numbers who are buying paste for precious stones, and, albeit, by no means destitute of the critical faculty, ostentatiously parading the worthless make-believe in the sincere conviction that they are gems of the purest ray serene. Any muff can make himself a considerable man, if he will but shout long and loud enough to the populace to step up! step up! and admire! “Behold me, gentlemen!” says the poet through himself or through his friends. “I am not so great a man as Shakespeare, and I have not Dante’s austere and morbid imagination. But it is universally acknowledged that I combine the sweetness of Keats and the wisdom of Wordsworth with the power of Byron and the ghastliness of Coleridge; and give me leave to say that the man who can rival these acknowledged geniuses must be great?” “Hooroor!” yell the populace. They believe him; they buy his quarto of nonsense; and lo! another muff is canonised.
So I maintain that my father was right when he exhorted me to treat life as a court-dress affair. The world is so full of hero-worshippers, that no man can think himself too important.