“It isn’t that yer clothes are smarter, or that yer’ve grown older or anything like that. It’s that you seem to have pulled yer feet out of this place, me girl. It doesn’t seem to be your place now.—It’s manner. It’s the way yer hold yer head, tilt yer chin up.—It’s accent. It’s the way you end yer sentences. When a woman comes into the shop and speaks to me as you do, I know that she won’t pay her bills but that her name’s in the Red Book.—You little monkey, yer’ve picked up all the tricks and manners of her ladyship. You’ll be saying ‘My God’ soon, as yer aunt tells us Lady Feo does! Well, well, well.” And he hugged her again, laughed, and then, finding that he showed certain points of his French antecedents, began to exaggerate them as he had seen Robert Nainby do at the Gaiety. He was a consummate actor and a very honest person. The two don’t always go together.
And then Mrs. Breezy, who in the meantime had been practical and shut the shop, followed them into the parlor, which seemed to Lola to be shrinking every time she saw it and more crowded with cardboard boxes, account books, alarm clocks and the surplus from the shop, and sprang a little surprise. “Who do you think’s coming to dinner to-night?” she asked.
“Is anybody coming to dinner? What a nuisance,” said Lola, who had looked forward to enjoying the company of her father and mother uninterrupted.
John Breezy gave a roguish glance at his wife and winked. “Give yer ten guesses,” he said.
“No,” said Mrs. Breezy, “Albert Simpkins.”
“Simpky? How funny. Did you ask him or did he ask himself?”
“I see. The true Simpky way. He suggested that he would like to have dinner with you and you caught the suggestion. He comes of such a long line of men who have worn their masters’ clothes that he is now a sort of second-hand edition of them all, and I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if, when he falls in love, he goes to the parents first and asks their permission to propose to the daughter; and he’ll probably ask not for the daughter herself but for her hand,—which never seems to me to be much of a compliment to the daughter.”
Mrs. Breezy and her husband exchanged a quick glance. Either there was something uncanny about Lola or she knew that this very respectable man was madly in love with her. During his numerous visits to the jeweler’s shop Simpkins had invariably led the conversation round to Lola, finding a thousand phases of her character which he adored. But the last time he had been with them there was something in his manner and voice which made it easy to guess that his visit that evening was for the purpose of asking them whether they considered him worthy of becoming their son-in-law. It may be said that they considered that he was, especially after he had told them about the money inherited from his father and his own savings and confided in them his scheme of buying that very desirable inn at Wargrave, in which they could, of course, frequently spend very pleasant week-ends during the summer months. They had before this recognized in him a man of great depth of feeling, of excellent principles and a certain strange ecstasy,—somewhat paradoxical in one who nearly always appeared in a swallow-tail coat, dark trousers and a black tie.