“None in the world,” I assented. “Do you criticize me?”
“No, no, no, indeed!” he answered, nervous, and taking seriously what I had intended as a joke.
After a while I dragged in the subject. “One thing I can and will do to get myself in line for that club,” I said, like a seal on promenade. “I'm sick of the crowd I travel with—the men and the women. I feel it's about time I settled down. I've got a fortune and establishment that needs a woman to set it off. I can make some woman happy. You don't happen to know any nice girls—the right sort, I mean?”
“Not many.” said Sam. “You'd better go back to the country where you came from, and get her there. She'd be eternally grateful, and her head wouldn't be full of mercenary nonsense.”
“Excuse me!” exclaimed I. “It'd turn her head. She'd go clean crazy. She'd plunge in up to her neck—and not being used to these waters, she'd make a show of herself, and probably drown, dragging me down with her, if possible.”
Sam laughed. “Keep out of marriage, Matt,” he advised, not so obtuse to my real point as he wanted me to believe. “I know the kind of girl you've got in mind. She'd marry you for your money, and she'd never appreciate you. She'd see in you only the lack of the things she's been taught to lay stress on.”
“For instance?”
“I couldn't tell you any more than I could enable you to recognize a person you'd never seen by describing him.”
“Ain't I a gentleman?” I inquired.
He laughed, as if the idea tickled him. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”
“Ain't I got as proper a country place as there is a-going? Ain't my apartment in the Willoughby a peach? Don't I give as elegant dinners as you ever sat down to? Don't I dress right up to the Piccadilly latest? Don't I act all right—know enough to keep my feet off the table and my knife out of my mouth?” All true enough; and I so crude then that I hadn't a suspicion what a flat contradiction of my pretensions and beliefs about myself the very words and phrases were.
“You're right
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