One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
than their acquaintanceship quite sanctioned; but his grasp
and his look of overflowing were immediately privileged; Mr.
Carling, enjoying this anecdotal gentleman’s conversation as
he did, liked the warmth, and was flattered during the squeeze
with a prospect of his wife and friends partaking of the fun
from time to time.
‘I was telling my wife yesterday your story of the lady contrabandist:
I don’t think she has done laughing since,’ Mr.
Calling said.
Fenellan fluted: ‘Ah?’ He had scent, in the eulogy of a story
grown flat as Election hats, of a good sort of man in the way
of men, a step or two behind the man of the world. He expressed
profound regret at not having heard the silvery ring
of the lady’s laughter.
Carling genially conceived a real gratification to be conferred
on his wife. ‘Perhaps you will some day honour us?’
‘You spread gold-leaf over the days to come, sir.’
‘Now, if I might name the day?’
‘You lump the gold and make it current coin;—says the
blushing bride, who ought not to have delivered herself so
boldly, but she had forgotten her bashful part and spoilt the
scene, though, luckily for the damsel, her swain was a lover
of nature, and finding her at full charge, named the very
next day of the year, and held her to it, like the complimentary
tyrant he was.’
‘To-morrow, then!’ said Carling intrepidly, on a dash of
enthusiasm, through a haggard thought of his wife and the
cook and the netting of friends at short notice. He urged his
eagerness to ask whether he might indeed have the satisfaction
of naming to-morrow.
‘With happiness,’ Fenellan responded.
Mrs. Carling was therefore in for it.
‘To-morrow, half-past seven: as for company to meet you,
we will do what we can. You go Westward?’
‘To bed with the sun,’ said the reveller.
‘Perhaps by Covent Garden? I must give orders there.’
‘Orders given in Covent Garden, paint a picture for bachelors
of the domestic Paradise an angel must help them to
enter! Ah, dear me! Is there anything on earth to compare
with the pride of a virtuous life?’
‘I was married at four and twenty,’ said Carling, as one
taking up the expository second verse of a poem; plain facts,
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