“I wish we could—”
“Oh, well, if you want to; but I propose that we don’t make them the offer until next year or the year after. We shall have our matters arranged better by that time.”
“And now about Isaac Wickersham?”
“Have you seen him lately?”
“Two or three days ago.”
“Did he seem discontented or unhappy?”
“No.”
“You promised to help him?”
“What I said was, ‘We are going to do something for you, Isaac’”
“Something! That commits us to nothing in particular. Was it your idea, Mary Jane, to make him an allowance?”
“Yes.”
“There you cut into our insufficient income again. I don’t see how we can afford it with all these expenses heaping up on us; really I don’t.”
“But we must give him something; I promised it.”
George thought a moment and then said:
“This is the end of September and I sha’nt want this straw hat that I have been wearing all summer. Suppose you give him that. A good straw hat is ‘something.’”
“You remember Mrs. Clausen, George?”
“Have we got to load up with her, too?”
“Let me explain. You recall that I told her I would try to make her comfortable, and when I found that our circumstances were going to be really straitened, I sent her my red flannel petticoat with my love, for I know she can be comfortable in that.”
“Of course she can.”
“So this afternoon when I came up from the city she got out of the train with me and I felt so half-ashamed of the gift that I pretended not to see her and hurried out to the carriage and drove quickly up the hill. She is afraid of horses, anyhow.”
“Always was,” said George.
“But, George, I don’t feel quite right about it yet; the gift of a petticoat is rather stingy, isn’t it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“And, George, to be perfectly honest with ourselves now, don’t you think we are a little bit meaner than we were, say, last June?”
George cleared his throat and hesitated, and then he said:
“I admit nothing, excepting that the only people who are fit to have money are the people who know how to take care of it.”
THE WICKED ZEBRA, by Frank Roe Batchelder
The zebra always seems malicious,—
He kicks and bites ’most all the time;
I fear that he’s not only vicious,
But guilty of some dreadful crime.
The mere suggestion makes me falter
In writing of this wicked brute;
Although he has escaped the halter,
He wears for life a convict’s suit.
TITBOTTOM’S SPECTACLES, by George William Curtis
In my mind’s eye, Horatio.
Prue and I do not entertain much; our means forbid it. In truth, other people entertain for us. We enjoy that hospitality of which no account is made. We see the show, and hear the music, and smell the flowers of great festivities, tasting as it were the drippings from rich dishes. Our own dinner service is remarkably plain, our dinners, even on state occasions, are strictly in keeping, and almost our only guest is Titbottom. I buy a handful of roses as I come up from the office, perhaps, and Prue arranges them so prettily in a glass dish for the centre of the table that even when I have hurried out to see Aurelia step into her carriage to go out to dine, I have thought that the bouquet she carried was not more beautiful because it was more costly. I grant that it was more harmonious with her superb beauty and her rich attire. And I have no doubt that if Aurelia knew the old man, whom she must have seen so often watching her, and his wife, who ornaments her sex with as much sweetness, although with less splendor, than Aurelia herself, she would also acknowledge that the nosegay of roses was as fine and fit upon their table as her own sumptuous bouquet is for herself. I have that faith in the perception of that lovely lady. It is at least my habit—I hope I may say, my nature, to believe the best of people, rather than the worst. If I thought that all this sparkling setting of beauty—this fine fashion—these blazing jewels and lustrous silks and airy gauzes, embellished with gold-threaded embroidery and wrought in a thousand exquisite elaborations, so that I cannot see one of those lovely girls pass me by without thanking God for the vision—if I thought that this was all, and that underneath her lace flounces and diamond bracelets Aurelia was a sullen, selfish woman, then I should turn sadly homewards, for I should see that her jewels were flashing scorn upon the object they adorned, and that her laces were of a more exquisite loveliness than the woman whom they merely touched with a superficial grace. It would be like a gaily decorated mausoleum—bright to see, but silent and dark within.
“Great excellences, my dear Prue,” I sometimes allow myself to say, “lie concealed in the depths of character, like pearls at the bottom of the sea. Under the laughing, glancing surface, how little they are suspected! Perhaps love is nothing else than the sight of them by one person. Hence every man’s mistress is apt to be an enigma to everybody else. I have no doubt that when Aurelia is engaged, people will say that she is a most admirable girl, certainly; but they cannot understand why any man should be in love with her. As if it were at all necessary that they should! And her lover, like a boy who finds a pearl in the public street, and wonders as much that others did not see it as that he did, will tremble until he knows his passion is returned; feeling, of course, that the whole world must be in love with this paragon who cannot possibly smile upon anything so unworthy as he.”
“I hope, therefore, my dear Mrs. Prue,” I continue to say to my wife, who looks up from her work regarding me with pleased pride, as if I were such an irresistible humorist, “you will allow me to believe that the depth may be calm although the surface is dancing. If you tell me that Aurelia is but a giddy girl, I shall believe that you think so. But I shall know, all the while, what profound dignity, and sweetness, and peace lie at the foundation of her character.”
I say such things to Titbottom during the dull season at the office. And I have known him sometimes to reply with a kind of dry, sad humor, not as if he enjoyed the joke, but as if the joke must be made, that he saw no reason why I should be dull because the season was so.
“And what do I know of Aurelia or any other girl?” he says to me with that abstracted air. “I, whose Aurelias were of another century and another zone.”
Then he falls into a silence which it seems quite profane to interrupt. But as we sit upon our high stools at the desk opposite each other, I leaning upon my elbows and looking at him; he, with sidelong face, glancing out of the window, as if it commanded a boundless landscape, instead of a dim, dingy office court, I cannot refrain from saying:
“Well!”
He turns slowly, and I go chatting on—a little too loquacious, perhaps, about those young girls. But I know that Titbottom regards such an excess as venial, for his sadness is so sweet that you could believe it the reflection of a smile from long, long years ago.
One day, after I had been talking for a long time, and we had put up our books, and were preparing to leave, he stood for some time by the window, gazing with a drooping intentness, as if he really saw something more than the dark court, and said slowly:
“Perhaps you would have different impressions of things if you saw them through my spectacles.”
There