Paul Kelver. Jerome Klapka Jerome

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      “It was very nice of you,” said Mrs. Cottle, thus completing the circle of compliments, “and, as I always tell my girls, that is better than being beautiful.”

      “Kind hearts,” added Dr. Florret, summing up the case, “are more than coronets.” Dr. Florret had ever ready for the occasion the correct quotation, but from him, somehow, it never irritated; rather it fell upon the ear as a necessary rounding and completing of the theme; like the Amen in church.

      Only to my aunt would further observations have occurred.

      “When I was a girl,” said my aunt, breaking suddenly upon the passing silence, “I used to look into the glass and say to myself: ‘Fanny, you’ve got to be amiable,’ and I was amiable,” added my aunt, challenging contradiction with a look; “nobody can say that I wasn’t, for years.”

      “It didn’t pay?” suggested Hasluck.

      “It attracted,” replied my aunt, “no attention whatever.”

      Hasluck had changed places with my mother, and having after many experiments learned the correct pitch for conversation with old Teidelmann, talked with him as much aside as the circumstances of the case would permit. Hasluck never wasted time on anything else than business. It was in his opera box on the first night of Verdi’s Aida (I am speaking of course of days then to come) that he arranged the details of his celebrated deal in guano; and even his very religion, so I have been told and can believe, he varied to suit the enterprise of the moment, once during the protracted preliminaries of a cocoa scheme becoming converted to Quakerism.

      But for the most of us interest lay in a discussion between Washburn and Florret concerning the superior advantages attaching to residence in the East End.

      As a rule, incorrect opinion found itself unable to exist in Dr. Florret’s presence. As no bird, it is said, can continue its song once looked at by an owl, so all originality grew silent under the cold stare of his disapproving eye. But Dr. “Fighting Hal” was no gentle warbler of thought. Vehement, direct, indifferent, he swept through all polite argument as a strong wind through a murmuring wood, carrying his partisans with him further than they meant to go, and quite unable to turn back; leaving his opponents clinging desperately – upside down, anyhow – to their perches, angry, their feathers much ruffled.

      “Life!” flung out Washburn – Dr. Florret had just laid down unimpeachable rules for the conduct of all mankind on all occasions – “what do you respectable folk know of life? You are not men and women, you are marionettes. You don’t move to your natural emotions implanted by God; you dance according to the latest book of etiquette. You live and love, laugh and weep and sin by rule. Only one moment do you come face to face with life; that is in the moment when you die, leaving the other puppets to be dressed in black and make believe to cry.”

      It was a favourite subject of denunciation with him, the artificiality of us all.

      “Little doll,” he had once called me, and I had resented the term.

      “That’s all you are, little Paul,” he had persisted, “a good little hard-working doll, that does what it’s made to do, and thinks what it’s made to think. We are all dolls. Your father is a gallant-hearted, soft-headed little doll; your mother the sweetest and primmest of dolls. And I’m a silly, dissatisfied doll that longs to be a man, but hasn’t the pluck. We are only dolls, little Paul.”

      “He’s a trifle – a trifle whimsical on some subjects,” explained my father, on my repeating this conversation.

      “There are a certain class of men,” explained my mother – “you will meet with them more as you grow up – who talk for talking’s sake. They don’t know what they mean. And nobody else does either.”

      “But what would you have?” argued Dr. Florret, “that every man should do that which is right in his own eyes?”

      “Far better than, like the old man in the fable, he should do what every other fool thinks right,” retorted Washburn. “The other day I called to see whether a patient of mine was still alive or not. His wife was washing clothes in the front room. ‘How’s your husband?’ I asked. ‘I think he’s dead,’ replied the woman. Then, without leaving off her work, ‘Jim,’ she shouted, ‘are you there?’ No answer came from the inner room. ‘He’s a goner,’ she said, wringing out a stocking.”

      “But surely,” said Dr. Florret, “you don’t admire a woman for being indifferent to the death of her husband?”

      “I don’t admire her for that,” replied Washburn, “and I don’t blame her. I didn’t make the world and I’m not responsible for it. What I do admire her for is not pretending a grief she didn’t feel. In Berkeley Square she’d have met me at the door with an agonised face and a handkerchief to her eyes.