Of course you’ll drink the family ale? BLENKINSOP. Of course I’ll do nothing of the kind. MRS. DOT. You know it’s one of my principles to have it on the table. BLENKINSOP. Yes, but it’s one of my principles not to drink it. I seem to remember that you have some particularly fine hock. MRS. DOT. Jimmie, have you never been in love? BLENKINSOP. Never, thank God. MRS. DOT. I don’t believe it. Every one’s in love. I’m in love. BLENKINSOP. Not with me, I trust. MRS. DOT. You perfect idiot. BLENKINSOP. Not at all. I should think it very natural. MRS. DOT. I wonder why you never married, James. BLENKINSOP. Because I have a considerable gift for repartee. I discovered in my early youth that men propose not because they want to marry, but because on certain occasions they are entirely at a loss for topics of conversation. AUNT ELIZA. [_Smiling._] It was a momentous discovery. BLENKINSOP. No sooner had I made it than I began to cultivate my power of small talk. I felt that my only chance was to be ready with appropriate subjects at the shortest notice, and I spent a considerable part of my last year at Oxford in studying the best masters. MRS. DOT. I never noticed that you were particularly brilliant. BLENKINSOP. I never played for brilliancy. I played for safety. I flatter myself that when prattle was needed I have never been found wanting. I have met the ingenuity of sweet seventeen with a few observations on Free Trade, while the haggard efforts of thirty have struggled in vain against a brief exposition of the higher philosophy. The skittish widow of uncertain age has retired in disorder before a complete acquaintance with the restoration dramatists, and I have routed the serious spinster with religious leanings by my remarkable knowledge of the results of missionary endeavour in Central Africa. Once a dowager sought to ask me my intentions, but I flung at her astonished head an entire article from the “Encyclopædia Britannica.” These are only my serious efforts. I need not tell you how often I have evaded a flash of the eyes by an epigram or ignored a sigh by an apt quotation from the poets. MRS. DOT. I don’t believe a word you say. I believe you never married for the simple reason that nobody would have you. BLENKINSOP. Do me the justice to acknowledge that I’m the only man who’s known you ten days without being tempted by your preposterous income to offer you his hand and heart. MRS. DOT. I don’t believe my income has anything to do with it. I put it down entirely to my very considerable personal attractions. AUNT ELIZA. Here is Freddie, at last. What has he been doing? [FREDDIE _comes in, having changed into flannels_. MRS. DOT. Why on earth have you changed your clothes? FREDDIE. [_Sitting down at table._] I regard it as part of my duties as your secretary to look nice. MRS. DOT. I don’t know that I think it essential for you to put on seven different suits a day. FREDDIE.