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ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD 499
Philip Firmin is coarse and offensive at times, and Bickerton
in holding this opinion is not altogether wrong.
"I'll drink claret when I come to you, old boy," he says,
grinning ; " and at home I will have whisky-and-water."
" But suppose Charlotte is ordered claret !"
" Well, she can have it," says this liberal lover ; " a bottle will
last her a week."
"Don't you see," I shriek out, "that even a bottle a week
costs something like—six by fifty-two—eighteen pounds a year!"
(I own it is really only fifteen twelve; but, in the hurry of argument,
a man may stretch a figure or so.) "Eighteen pounds for Charlotte's
claret ; as much, at least, you great boozy toper, for your whisky
and beer. Why, you actually want a tenth part of your income
for the liquor you consume ! And then clothes ; and then lodging ;
and then coals ; and then doctor's bills ; and then pocket-money ;
and then seaside for the little dears. Just have the kindness to
add these things up, and you will find that you have about twoand-ninepence
left to pay the grocer and the butcher."
"What you call prudence," says Philip, thumping the table
and, of course, breaking a glass, "I call cowardice—I call blasphemy
! Do you mean, as a Christian man, to tell me that two
young people and a family, if it should please Heaven to send them
one, cannot subsist upon five hundred pounds a year ? Look round,
sir, at the myriads of God's creatures who live, love, are happy and
poor, and be ashamed of the wicked doubt which you utter !" And
he starts up, and strides up and down the dining-room, curling his
flaming moustache, and rings the bell fiercely, and says, " Johnson,
I've broke a glass. Get me another."
In the drawing-room, my wife asks what we two were fighting
about ? And, as Charlotte is upstairs, telling the children stories
as they are put to bed, or writing to her dear mamma, or what
not, our friend bursts out with more rude and violent expressions
than he had used in the dining-room over my glasses which he was
smashing, tells my own wife that I am an atheist, or at best a
miserable sceptic and Sadducee: that I doubt of the goodness of
Heaven, and am not thankful for my daily bread. And, with one
of her kindling looks directed towards the young man, of course my
wife sides with him. Miss Char presently came down from the
young folks, and went to the piano and played us Beethoven's
" Dream of Saint Jerome," which always soothes me, and charms
me, so that I fancy it is a poem of Tennyson in music. And our
children, as they sink off to sleep overhead, like to hear soft music,
which soothes them into slumber, Miss Baynes says. And Miss
Charlotte looks very pretty at her piano ; and Philip lies gazing at