“I wonder, with your refined taste, that you could ever tolerate the notion of settling into a banker’s clerk.”
Was she ironical? Was she sarcastic? Her eyes were all innocence; her face all candour.
“It is not the choice of my will, but of my poverty. Nature made me a gentleman, but forgot to endow me. Therefore there is nothing for me to do, but to forget her good intentions and learn book-keeping.”
Here she looked at the clock, and as she did so her mamma came rustling and swelling in, decked out in a fine bonnet, new gloves, and a stiff blue silk gown.
“Haven’t you been to see the grounds, Charlie?” she asked.
“I have been very well entertained,” I replied with a smile at Conny.
“There’s the carriage!” exclaimed my cousin, and a barouche with two horses, driven by my friend James in silver livery, swept along the avenue and stopped at the door.
“We have lost our footman,” said my aunt, apologetically, as we passed out, “but I hope to replace him next week.” I begged her not to mention it; we got in, and off we went.
I faced Conny, and was thus able to alternate luxuriously between the beauties of nature and the beauties of human nature. When we reached Updown, James was requested to drive slowly, in order that I might “view” the town. It turned out that my aunt was a native of the place, and knew a good deal of its history, social and otherwise. The carriage was stopped at the huge gateway at the bottom of the High Street, that I might decipher the inscription, and admire the carvings. Unfortunately the inscription was in Latin, with v’s for u’s. I did not understand it, but as I had always been given to believe that a knowledge of the dead tongues was esteemed a very essential ingredient in the composition of a gentleman’s character, I looked wise, and talked much nonsense about the unintelligibility of mediæval Latin.
“They say,” observed my aunt, “that this gate was built by the Romans.”