So far everything that had befallen me was entirely to my taste. My uncle’s reception of me had been overpowering; my aunt, it was plain, thought me a very fine and splendid person; my cousin was pretty enough to make Updown a paradise; and nothing could be more comfortable than my lodgings. After tea I lighted a pipe and stretched myself along the sofa and thought over matters. It was, perhaps, all for the best that I had decided not to live at Grove End. I could keep up my dignity better by residing at a distance. No doubt I should be asked there as often as I cared to be; and I should certainly enjoy my kind-hearted relations’ hospitality not the less because I could combine my privileges with personal independence.
Conny ran in my head a good deal. What a little pet she was! I could love that girl, I thought. Who was Curling? Did she like him? He must be a very impertinent sort of fellow to think about her. I supposed that he had paid her attention, and as perhaps he was not entirely ugly, and as young men didn’t abound in these parts, she had talked a little nonsense about him to her mamma, which had frightened the old lady. Pshaw! thought I, what chance would Curling stand against me if I took it into my head to unseat him? What! a banker’s clerk, a man of pass-books and cancelled cheques against a gentleman who knew nothing of business, who thought money an insufferable bore, and credit the easiest and most courtly way of supplying one’s needs; who was a man of the world, a great favourite with women, a good billiard player, and the friend, the intimate friend, of men who, were it not for their tailors and hatters, would be making brilliant with their presence and wit the high society from which the heartless dun or the yet more inexorable bailiff had obliged them to beat a precipitate retreat.
I laughed at the absurdity of the idea. Why, in all probability, Conny was already in love with me. Of course they were talking about me at Grove End. Couldn’t I hear my uncle exclaim, with pardonable exultation, “My nephew!” which meant, “See, my dears, what our side has produced!” And what could my aunt do but praise me and abuse Curling, and contrast my manners with the cashier’s (Oh, humiliating comparison!), and wonder, with a sneer, whether Louis Napoleon would have pulled off his hat to Curling’s papa?
Risum teneatis, amici? asks Maunder’s Treasury of Knowledge. I was Mr. Bottom, of the ass’s ears, in those days. Behold my magnanimity! I pull my ancient character out of obscurity, as I would an old coat to dress a scarecrow withal, that it may be a warning and a horror to men. Only please don’t confound the high-minded being who addresses you with the senseless, conceited dummy that idly flaps his useless arms about the fields.
CHAPTER IV.
“There
Thy uncle—this thy first cousin, and these
Are all thy near relations.”