One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
he shook off his bars of bullion, to rise the lighter, and left a
wretched female soul below, with the devil’s own testimony
to her attractions—thousands in the Funds, houses in the
City. She threw the young couple together. And my friend
Victor Radnor is of a particularly inflammable nature. Imagine
one of us in such a situation, Mr. Carting!’
‘Trying!’ said the lawyer.
‘The dear fellow was as nigh death as a man can be and
know the sweetness of a woman’s call to him to live. And
here’s London’s garden of pines, bananas, oranges; all the
droppings of the Hesperides here! We don’t reflect on it, Mr.
Carling.’
‘Not enough, not enough.’
‘I feel such a spout of platitudes that I could out With a
Leading Article on a sheet of paper on your back while you’re
bending over the baskets. I seem to have got circularly round
again to Eden when I enter a garden. Only, here we have to
pay for the fruits we pluck. Well, and just the same there;
and no end to the payment either. We’re always paying! By
the way, Mrs. Victor Radnor’s dinner-table’s a spectacle. Her
taste in flowers equals her lord’s in wine. But age improves
the wine and spoils the flowers, you’ll say. Maybe you’re for
arguing that lovely women show us more of the flower than
the grape, in relation to the course of time. I pray you not to
forget the terrible intoxicant she is. We reconcile it, Mr.
Carling, with the notion that the grape’s her spirit, the flower
her body. Or is it the reverse? Perhaps an intertwining. But
look upon bouquets and clusters, and the idea of woman
springs up at once, proving she’s composed of them. I was
about to remark, that with deference to the influence of Mrs.
Burman’s legal adviser, an impenitent or penitent sinner’s
pastor, the Reverend gentleman ministering to her spiritual
needs, would presumptively exercise it, in this instance, in a
superior degree.’
Carling murmured: ‘The Rev. Groseman Buttermore’; and
did so for something of a cover, to continue a run of internal
reflections: as, that he was assuredly listening to vinous talk
in the streets by day; which impression placed him on a decorous
platform above the amusing gentleman; to whom, however,
he grew cordial, in recognizing consequently, that his
exuberant flow could hardly be a mask; and that an indication
here and there of a trap in his talk, must have been due
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