Frank.  It’s all right.  It’s Miss Warren’s.

Rev.  S. I have not seen her at church since she came.

Frank.  Of course not:  she’s a third wrangler.  Ever so intellectual.  Took a higher degree than you did; so why should she go to hear you preach?

Rev.  S. Don’t be disrespectful, sir.

Frank.  Oh, it don’t matter:  nobody hears us.  Come in. [He opens the gate, unceremoniously pulling his father with it into the garden].  I want to introduce you to her.  Do you remember the advice you gave me last July, gov’nor?

Rev.  S. [severely] Yes.  I advised you to conquer your idleness and flippancy, and to work your way into an honorable profession and live on it and not upon me.

Frank.  No:  thats what you thought of afterwards.  What you actually said was that since I had neither brains nor money, I’d better turn my good looks to account by marrying someone with both.  Well, look here.  Miss Warren has brains:  you can’t deny that.

Rev.  S. Brains are not everything.

Frank.  No, of course not:  theres the money—­

Rev.  S. [interrupting him austerely] I was not thinking of money, sir.  I was speaking of higher things.  Social position, for instance.

Frank.  I don’t care a rap about that.

Rev.  S. But I do, sir.

Frank.  Well, nobody wants y o u to marry her.  Anyhow, she has what amounts to a high Cambridge degree; and she seems to have as much money as she wants.

Rev.  S. [sinking into a feeble vein of humor] I greatly doubt whether she has as much money as y o u will want.

Frank.  Oh, come:  I havn’t been so very extravagant.  I live ever so quietly; I don’t drink; I don’t bet much; and I never go regularly to the razzle-dazzle as you did when you were my age.

Rev.  S. [booming hollowly] Silence, sir.

Frank.  Well, you told me yourself, when I was making every such an ass of myself about the barmaid at Redhill, that you once offered a woman fifty pounds for the letters you wrote to her when—­

Rev.  S. [terrified] Sh-sh-sh, Frank, for Heaven’s sake! [He looks round apprehensively Seeing no one within earshot he plucks up courage to boom again, but more subduedly].  You are taking an ungentlemanly advantage of what I confided to you for your own good, to save you from an error you would have repented all your life long.  Take warning by your father’s follies, sir; and don’t make them an excuse for your own.

Frank.  Did you ever hear the story of the Duke of Wellington and his letters?

Rev.  S. No, sir; and I don’t want to hear it.

Frank.  The old Iron Duke didn’t throw away fifty pounds:  not he.  He just wrote:  “Dear Jenny:  publish and be damned!  Yours affectionately, Wellington.”  Thats what you should have done.