"No, nor I don't want to. Now you jest shut up, Mike. I'm tired a hearin' ye. This thing about women is one as has half the fun of it in larnin' it as ye go along. Ye mean well enough, Mike, but yer eddication is poor; an' if it's all the same to ye, I'll take my pudden straight an' leave yer sarse for them as likes it."
Jim's utter rejection of the further good offices of Mike, in the endeavor to instruct him in the management of his future relations with the little woman, did not sink very deep into the Irishman's sensibilities. Indeed, it could not have done so, for their waters were shallow, and, as at this moment Mike's "owld woman" called both to dinner, the difference was forgotten in the sympathy of hunger and the satisfactions of the table.
Jim felt that he was undergoing a change--had undergone one, in fact. It had never revealed itself to him so fully as it did during his conversation with Mike. The building of the hotel, the study of the wants of another grade of civilization than that to which he had been accustomed, the frequent conversations with Miss Butterworth, the responsibilities he had assumed, all had tended to lift him; and he felt that Mike Conlin was no longer a tolerable companion. The shallowness of the Irishman's mind and life disgusted him, and he knew that the time would soon come when, by a process as natural as the falling of the leaves in autumn, he should drop a whole class of associations, and stand where he could look down upon them--where they would look up to him. The position of principal, the command of men, the conduct of, and the personal responsibility for, a great enterprise, had given him conscious growth. His old life and his old associations were insufficient to contain him.
After dinner they started on, for the first time accompanied by Mike's wife. Before her marriage she had lived the life common to her class--that of cook and housemaid in the families of gentlemen. She knew the duties connected with the opening of a house, and could bring its machinery into working order. She could do a thousand things that a man either could not do, or would not think of doing; and Jim had arranged that she should be housekeeper until the mistress of the establishment should be installed in her office.