England -- Fiction; Love stories; Scholars -- Fiction
"Well, no; I can't exactly say that I have paid money for them. That
is to say, they have paid their own bills, and I have not lent them
anything. But I dare say you know that a man never travels with
ladies in that free and easy way without feeling it in his pocket.
One is apt to do twenty things for them which one wouldn't do for
oneself; nor they for themselves if they had to pay the piper."
Now here a very useful moral may be deduced. Ladies, take care how
you permit yourselves to fall into intimacies with unknown gentlemen
on your travels. It is not pleasant to be spoken of as this man was
speaking of Miss Baker and her niece. The truth was, that a more
punctilious person in her money dealings than Miss Baker never
carried a purse. She had not allowed Mr. M'Gabbery so much as to lay
out on her behalf a single piastre for oranges on the road. Nor had
he been their sole companion on their journey through the desert.
They had come to Jerusalem with a gentleman and his wife: Mr.
M'Gabbery had been kindly allowed to join them.
"Well, if I were you, I should show them a cold shoulder," said Mr.
Cruse; "and as to that intolerable puppy, I should take no further
notice of him, except by cutting him dead."
Mr. M'Gabbery at last promised to follow his friend's advice, and so
Miss Todd's picnic came to an end without bloodshed.
CHAPTER X.
THE EFFECTS OF MISS TODD'S PICNIC.
Sir Lionel did not participate violently either in his son's disgust
at the falsehood of that holy sepulchre church, nor in his enthusiasm
as to the Mount of Olives. In the former, he walked about as he had
done in many other foreign churches, looked a little to the right and
a little to the left, observed that the roof seemed to be rather out
of order, declined entering the sanctum sanctorum, and then asked
whether there was anything more to be seen. He did not care, he said,
about going upstairs into the gallery; and when George suggested
that he should descend into the Armenian chapel, he observed that it
appeared to be very dark and very crowded. He looked at the Turkish
janitors without dismay, and could not at all understand why George
should not approve of them.
He was equally cold and equally complaisant on the Mount of Olives.
He would willingly have avoided the ascent could he have done so
without displeasing his son; but George made a point of it. A donkey
was therefore got for him, and he rode up.
"Ah! yes," said he, "a very clear view of the city; oh, that was
Solomon's temple, was it? And now they have a mosque there, have
they? Ah! perhaps the Brahmins will have a turn at it before the
world is done. It's a barren sort of hill after all, is it not?"
And then George tried very much in vain to make his father understand
why he wished to go into the church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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