Now that my uncle had at last begun to grasp the true greatness of his egg, he apparently considered it becoming to drop the tone of half-patronising pity he had previously adopted. "Come," said he, smiling, with a dash of raillery, over his coffee-cup; "admit you are a humbug, you whitened sepulchre of an anticipated chick! Until you found a congenial soul and overwhelmed me with your confidence, what a career of deception--not mean, of course, but cynical--ironical--you have been leading. What a jest it must have been to you to be sold as new laid! How you laughed in your quiet way at the mockery of life. Surely it was a worthy pair to Swift in cassock and bands conducting a marriage service. I can well fancy your silent scorn of the hand that put you in the bag. New laid! But now I have the full humour of you. You must pardon my dulness of apprehension. I grasp your meaning now; your quiet insistent teaching that all life is decay and all decay is life. No forcing the accent, no crudity, but a pervading persuasion. A noble gospel!" He paused impressively, placed the egg respectfully upon his bureau, and presently went off at a tangent to something else. "Shall I throw this away?" said the girl. "Good heavens! Throw it away? Certainly not. Put it in the library." (The library used to be the corner of the room by the window.) She stared at me with a certain attempt at confidence. She is a callous, impertinent kind of girl, and I fear inclined to be bold. "It _do_ smell, sir," she said to him. "That's the merit of it. It's irony. Go and put it on the fourth shelf near the window. There are some yellow-covered books there, and Swift, some comedies by a gentleman named Ibsen, and a couple of novels by two gentlemen named George ------. But there! you don't know one book from another! The fourth shelf from the top on the right-hand side." As the girl did so she looked over her hand at me, and lifted her eyebrows very slightly. THE GREAT CHANGE My uncle had been hectic all day. I knew and dreaded what was coming, and said nothing that by any chance could lead up to it. He absent-mindedly tipped the emu sixpence. Then we came to the wart hog. "A bachelor," he said, meditatively, scratching the brute's back. I hastily felt for a saving topic in the apprehensive darkness of my mind, and could find none. "I expect I shall be married in October," said my uncle. Then, sighing: "The idyll of my engagement was short-lived." It was out. Now, the day--my last idle day with my poor uncle--was a hideous wreck. All the topics he had fluttered round vanished, and, cold and awful, there loomed over us the one great topic. "What do you _think_ of marriage, George?" said my uncle, after a pause, prodding the wart hog suddenly. "That's your privilege," said I. "Married men don't dare to think of it. Bigamy."