Part 10

I might have mentioned Chumpleigh to Eliza, but I am sure that I have never told her all about him. However, I was not going to sulk, and so I told her the story again. The story would not have been so long if she hadn't interrupted me so frequently.

When I had finished, she said that it was time to go to bed, and I had wasted the evening.

I owned that possibly I had been chatting rather longer than I had intended, but I would still get those accounts done, and sit up to do them.

"And that means extra gas," she said. "That's the way money gets wasted."

"There are many men in my place," I said, "who would refuse to sit down to work as late as this. I don't. Why? On principle. Because it's through the cultivation of the sort of thing that I cultivate one arrives at fortune. Think what fortune would mean to us. Big house, large garden, servants, carriages. I should come in from a day with the hounds, and perhaps say I felt rather done up, and would like a glass of champagne. No question of expense--not a word about it--money no object. You'd just get the bottle out of the sideboard, and I should have my glass, and they'd finish it in the kitchen, and----"

"Are you going to begin, or are you not?" asked Eliza.

"This minute," I replied, opening the black bag. I examined the contents carefully.

"Well," I said, "this is a very strange occurrence indeed--most unaccountable! I don't remember ever to have done anything of the kind before, but I seem to have forgotten to bring that work from the city. Dear me! I shall be forgetting my head next."

Eliza's reply that this would be no great loss did not seem to me to be either funny, or polite, or even true. "You strangely forget yourself," I replied, and turned the gas out sharply.

SHAKESPEARE

I led up to it, saying to Eliza, not at all in a complaining way, "Does it not seem to you a pity to let these long winter evenings run to waste?"

"Yes, dear," she replied; "I think you ought to do something."

"And you, too. Is it not so, darling?"

"There's generally some sewing, or the accounts."

"Yes; but these things do not exercise the mind."

"Accounts do."

"Not in the way I mean." I had now reached my point. "How would it be if I were to read aloud to you? I don't think you have ever heard me read aloud. You are fond of the theatre, and we cannot often afford to go. This would make up for it. There are many men who would tell you that they would sooner have a play read aloud to them than see it acted in the finest theatre in the world."

"Would they? Well--perhaps--if I were only sewing it wouldn't interrupt me much."

I said, "That is not very graciously put, Eliza. There is a certain art in reading aloud. Some have it, and some have not. I do not know if I have ever told you, but when I was a boy of twelve I won a prize for recitation, though several older boys were competing against me."

She said that I had told her before several times.

I continued: "And I suppose that I have developed since then. A man in our office once told me that he thought I should have done well on the stage. I don't know whether I ever mentioned it."

She said that I had mentioned it once or twice.

"I should have thought that you would have been glad of a little pleasure--innocent, profitable, and entertaining. However, if you think I am not capable of----"

"What do you want to read?"

"What would you like me to read?"

"Miss Sakers lent me this." She handed me a paper-covered volume, entitled, "The Murglow Mystery; or, The Stain on the Staircase."

"Trash like this is not literature," I said. However, to please her, I glanced at the first page. Half an hour later I said that I should be very sorry to read a book of that stamp out loud.

"Then why do you go on reading it to yourself?"