Part 56 (2/2)
”Quarrel with you, dear sir? I hope I feel your kindness, and know my duty better; but, sir, I am agitated, and my heart is troubled; and surely you go beyond reason. She is not old enough to have had so many lovers.”
”Humph! she has made good use of her time.”
”Even could I believe that she, who seems to me an angel, is a coquette, still she cannot be hard and heartless as you describe her.
It is impossible; it does not belong to her years.”
”You keep harping on her age, Dodd. Do you know her age? If you do, you have the advantage of me. I have not seen her baptismal register.
Have you?”
”No, sir, but I know what she says is her age.”
”That is only evidence of what is not her age.”
”But there is her face, sir; that is evidence.”
”You have never seen her face; it is always got up to deceive the public.”
”I have seen it at the dawn, before any of you were up.”
”What is that? Halo! the deuce--where?”
”In the garden.”
”In the garden? Oh, she does not jump off her down-bed on to a flowerbed. She had been an hour at work on that face before ever the sun or you got leave to look on it.”
”I'll stake my head I tell her age within a year, Mr. Bazalgette.”
”No you will not, nor within ten years.”
”That is soon seen. I call her one-and-twenty.”
”One-and-twenty! You are mad! Why, she has had a child that would be fifteen now if it had lived.”
”Miss Lucy? A child? Fifteen years? What on earth do you mean?”
”What do _you_ mean? What has Miss Lucy to do with it? You know very well it is MY WIFE I am warning you against, not that innocent girl.”
At this David burst out in his turn. ”YOUR WIFE! and have you so vile an opinion of me as to think I would eat your bread and tempt your wife under your roof. Oh, Mr. Bazalgette, is this the esteem you profess for me?”
”Go to the Devil!” shouted Bazalgette, in double ire at his own blunder and at being taken to task by his own Telemachus; he added, but in a very different tone, ”You are too good for this world.”
The best things we say miss fire in conversation; only second-rate shots. .h.i.t the mind through the ear. This, we will suppose, is why David derived no amus.e.m.e.nt or delectation from Mr. Bazalgette's inadvertent but admirable _bon-mot._
”Go to the Devil! you are too good for this world.”
He merely rose, and said gravely, ”Heaven forgive you your unjust suspicions, and G.o.d bless you for your other kindness. Good-by!”
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