It's a disagreeable subject; let it go!
But I'm very rich, you know," with an easy laugh, and the air of a man
only conscious, at last, of his good worldly fortune, and the exquisite
fit of his clothes. "Oh, I've got no end of money. After all, that's the
chief thing in this world. If a fellow's ordinarily clever and
good-natured, with a good reputation in town, what's a little row in the
suburban districts! It's an awfully insignificant affair, anyway, it
seems to me. We may as well talk sense, and the plainer the better.
People don't employ lenses for shortsightedness in that
particular--common sense, I mean. You walk without seeing, Miss
Hungerford, and you're bound to get infernally cheated, in some shape.
Why not me, I say, as well as another?"
Still, the fisherman's words roused no bitterness in me. His hardened
recklessness of speech served rather to strengthen me in the part I had
to play of the unapproachably sublime.
"I cannot consider that question," I said, with my hand on the door.
He swept my face with a keen glance that had lost none of its derisive
quality.
"So it's true, then!" he said. "The ultimatum has been reached, at last,
in the possessor of a pretty face and a broken fiddle! and dreams for the
restoration of the race are to end in a broken-down hovel by the sea,
in darning the Cradlebow's socks, and dressing the clams for dinner,
while the bucolic George Olver and the versatile Harvey, and all the rest
of the awkward, moon-gazing crew, take turns in sitting on the door-step,
and dilating on the weather! Ravishing idyll but it lacks substantiality.
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