“You’re a pluckier fellow than your uncle, me boy! Of course, it is on the cards that your head may be level. There are literary women _and_ literary women, no doubt, and this must be a favorable specimen of the tribe, or you wouldn’t have been in your present fix, but none of the lot in mine, if you please. When my turn comes—and I aint sure that I shan’t look out for a match some day, when I am too stiff to trot well in single harness, I shall hold the reins. No inside seat for me.”
The nephew laughed in a hearty, whole-souled way. He was not touched yet.
“You mix your figures as you do your cobblers—after you get hold of the sherry bottle—with a swing. Wait until you see my ‘match.’ She is a glorious woman, Uncle Sim. The wonder is that she ever got her eyes down to my level.”
The forty-year-old celibate continued to roll and harangue. His dress coat was new and a close fit to his rotund dapperness; with one lavender glove he smote the palm of his gloved left hand; the rose in his buttonhole was paler than the hard red spots on cheeks like underglazed pottery for smoothness and polish, his mustache curled upward and wriggled at animated periods.
“Quite the thing, me dear boy, altogether proper. For me part, I wouldn’t care to be under obligations to a woman when she _had_ worked down to my level, but tastes differ, and a man of twenty-six who has a living to make ought to cast an anchor to windward, in case of squalls. A woman who can chop a stick, at a pinch, to set the pot to boiling is a convenience. Literature’s a better trade now than it used to be, I suppose. Jones of Illinois was telling me last night of the prices paid to good selling authors, and by George! I was surprised. All the same, I’d fight shy of the Guild if I were contemplating matrimony. If you could see some of the many objects that hang about the Capitol in wait for Tom, Dick, or Harry to pick up a ‘personal,’ or lobby a bill, or get subscriptions to a book or magazine, you wouldn’t wonder at my ‘prejudice,’ as you are pleased to style it. Pah!”
To rid his mouth of the taste he caught up a tumbler of sherry cobbler, filmy without and icy amber within, and drained it.
The expectant bridegroom glanced at the clock. His best man was to call for him at a quarter-past seven. It was exactly seven now, and the minutes drove heavily.