No, in spite of all your flattering predictions, I
shall never be anything in this life more distinguished
than what I am now. Lady Glenalvon allows me
to sign myself her grateful friend,
K. C.
DEAR COUSIN MIVERS,—I am going abroad.
I may want money; for, in order to rouse motive power
within me, I mean to want money if I can. When
I was a boy of sixteen you offered me money to write
attacks upon veteran authors for “The Londoner.”
Will you give me money now for a similar display
of that grand New Idea of our generation; namely, that
the less a man knows of a subject the better he understands
it? I am about to travel into countries which
I have never seen, and among races I have never known.
My arbitrary judgments on both will be invaluable
to “The Londoner” from a Special Correspondent
who shares your respect for the anonymous, and whose
name is never to be divulged. Direct your answer
by return to me, poste restante, Calais.
Yours truly,
K. C.
MY DEAR FATHER,—I found your letter here,
whence I depart to-morrow.
Excuse haste. I go abroad, and shall write to
you from Calais.
I admire Leopold Travers very much. After all,
how much of self-balance there is in a true English
gentleman! Toss him up and down where you will,
and he always alights on his feet,—a gentleman.
He has one child, a daughter named Cecilia,—handsome
enough to allure into wedlock any mortal whom Decimus
Roach had not convinced that in celibacy lay the right
“Approach to the Angels.” Moreover,
she is a girl whom one can talk with. Even you
could talk with her. Travers wishes her to marry
a very respectable, good-looking, promising gentleman,
in every way “suitable,” as they say.
And if she does, she will rival that pink and perfection
of polished womanhood, Lady Glenalvon. I send
you back my portmanteau. I have pretty well
exhausted my experience-money, but have not yet encroached
on my monthly allowance. I mean still to live
upon that, eking it out, if necessary, by the sweat
of my brow or brains. But if any case requiring
extra funds should occur,—a case in which
that extra would do such real good to another that
I feel you would do it,—why, I must
draw a check on your bankers. But understand
that is your expense, not mine, and it is you
who are to be repaid in Heaven. Dear father,
how I do love and honour you every day more and more!
Promise you not to propose to any young lady till I
come first to you for consent!—oh, my dear
father, how could you doubt it? how doubt that I could
not be happy with any wife whom you could not love
as a daughter? Accept that promise as sacred.
But I wish you had asked me something in which obedience
was not much too facile to be a test of duty.
I could not have obeyed you more cheerfully if you
had asked me to promise never to propose to any young
lady at all. Had you asked me to promise that
I would renounce the dignity of reason for the frenzy
of love, or the freedom of man for the servitude of
husband, then I might have sought to achieve the impossible;
but I should have died in the effort!—and
thou wouldst have known that remorse which haunts
the bed of the tyrant.
