the man of the world. He expressed profound regret at not having heard the silvery ring of the lady’s laughter.
Carling genially conceived a real gratification to be conferred on his wife. ‘Perhaps you will some day honour us?’
‘You spread gold-leaf over the days to come, sir.’
‘Now, if I might name the day?’
‘You lump the gold and make it current coin;—says the blushing bride, who ought not to have delivered herself so boldly, but she had forgotten her bashful part and spoilt the scene, though, luckily for the damsel, her swain was a lover of nature, and finding her at full charge, named the very next day of the year, and held her to it, like the complimentary tyrant he was.’
‘To-morrow, then!’ said Carling intrepidly, on a dash of enthusiasm, through a haggard thought of his wife and the cook and the netting of friends at short notice. He urged his eagerness to ask whether he might indeed have the satisfaction of naming to-morrow.
‘With happiness,’ Fenellan responded.
Mrs. Carling was therefore in for it.
‘To-morrow, half-past seven: as for company to meet you, we will do what we can. You go Westward?’
‘To bed with the sun,’ said the reveller.
‘Perhaps by Covent Garden? I must give orders there.’
‘Orders given in Covent Garden, paint a picture for bachelors of the domestic Paradise an angel must help them to enter! Ah, dear me! Is there anything on earth to compare with the pride of a virtuous life?’
‘I was married at four and twenty,’ said Carling, as one taking up the expository second verse of a poem; plain facts, but weighty and necessary: ‘my wife was in her twentieth year: we have five children; two sons, three daughters, one married, with a baby. So we are grandfather and mother, and have never regretted the first step, I may say for both of us.’
‘Think of it! Good luck and sagacity joined hands overhead on the day you proposed to the lady: and I’d say, that all the credit is with her, but that it would seem to be at the expense of her sex.’
‘She would be the last to wish it, I assure you.’
‘True of all good women! You encourage me, touching a matter of deep interest, not unknown to you. The lady’s warm heart will be with us. Probably she sees Mrs. Burman?’
‘Mrs. Burman Radnor receives no one.’
A comic severity in the tone of the correction was deferentially accepted by Fenellan.
‘Pardon. She flies her flag, with her captain wanting; and she has, queerly, the right. So, then, the worthy dame who receives no one, might be treated, it struck us, conversationally, as a respectable harbour-hulk, with more history than top-honours. But she has the indubitable legal right to fly them—to proclaim it; for it means little else.’
‘You would have her, if I follow you, divest herself of the name?’
‘Pin me to no significations, if you please, O shrewdest of the legal sort! I have wit enough to escape you there. She is no doubt an estimable person.’
‘Well, she is; she is in her way a very good woman.’
‘Ah. You see, Mr. Carling, I cannot bring myself to rank her beside another lady, who has already claimed the title of me; and you will forgive me if I say, that your word “good” has a look of being stuck upon the features we know of her, like a coquette’s naughty patch; or it’s a jewel of an eye in an ebony idol: though I’ve heard tell she performs her charities.’
‘I believe she gives away three parts of her income and that is large.’
‘Leaving the good lady a fine fat fourth.’
‘Compare her with other wealthy people.’
‘And does she outshine the majority still with her personal attractions.
Carling was instigated by the praise he had bestowed on his wife to separate himself from a female pretender so ludicrous; he sought Fenellan’s nearest ear, emitting the sound of ‘hum.’
‘In other respects, unimpeachable!’
‘Oh! quite!’
‘There was a fishfag of classic Billingsgate, who had broken her husband’s nose with a sledgehammer fist, and swore before the magistrate, that the man hadn’t a crease to complain of in her character. We are condemned, Mr. Carling, sometimes to suffer in the flesh for the assurance we receive of the inviolability of those moral fortifications.’
‘Character, yes, valuable—I do wish you had named to-night for doing me the honour of dining with me!’ said the lawyer impulsively, in a rapture of the appetite for anecdotes. ‘I have a ripe Pichon Longueville, ’65.’
‘A fine wine. Seductive to hear of. I dine with my friend Victor Radnor. And he knows wine.—There are good women in the world, Mr. Carling, whose characters …’
‘Of course, of course there are; and I could name you some. We lawyers … !’
‘You encounter all sorts.’
‘Between ourselves,’ Carling sank his tones to the indiscriminate, where it mingled with the roar of London.
‘You do?’ Fenellan hazarded a guess at having heard enlightened liberal opinions regarding the sex. ‘Right!’
‘Many!’
‘I back you, Mr. Carling.’
The lawyer pushed to yet more confidential communication, up to the verge of the clearly audible: he spoke of examples, experiences. Fenellan backed him further.
‘Acting on behalf of clients, you understand, Mr. Fenellan.’
‘Professional, but charitable; I am with you.’
‘Poor things! we—if we have to condemn—we owe them something.’
‘A kind word for poor Polly Venus, with all the world against her! She doesn’t hear it often.’
‘A real service,’ Carling’s voice deepened to the legal ‘without prejudice,’—‘I am bound to say it—a service to Society.’
‘Ah, poor wench! And the kind of reward she gets?’
‘We can hardly examine … mysterious dispensations … here we are to make the best we can of it.’
‘For the creature Society’s indebted to? True. And am I to think there’s a body of legal gentlemen to join with you, my friend, in founding an Institution to distribute funds to preach charity over the country, and win compassion for her, as one of the principal persons of her time, that Society’s indebted to for whatever it’s indebted for?’
‘Scarcely that,’ said Carling, contracting.
‘But
