You talked of my reserve just now. Have I
dropped it at last? Have I spoken out at the eleventh hour?"
The captain laid his hand solemnly on his heart, and launched himself
once more on his broadest flow of language.
"You fill me with unavailing regret," he said. "If that old man
had lived, what a crop I might have reaped from him! What enormous
transactions in moral agriculture it might have been my privilege to
carry on! _Ars longa,_" said Captain Wragge, pathetically drifting into
Latin--"_vita brevis!_ Let us drop a tear on the lost opportunities of
the past, and try what the present can do to console us. One conclusion
is clear to my mind--the experiment you proposed to try with Mr.
Michael Vanstone is totally hopeless, my dear girl, in the case of his
son. His son is impervious to all common forms of pecuniary temptation.
You may trust my solemn assurance," continued the captain, speaking
with an indignant recollection of the answer to his advertisement in
the Times, "when I inform you that Mr. Noel Vanstone is emphatically the
meanest of mankind."
"I can trust my own experience as well," said Magdalen. "I have
seen him, and spoken to him--I know him better than you do.
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