But, as I said when first I showed it to the late Mrs. B., 'My dear,
you might have sat for it.' A well-developed woman, gentlemen,
though in the end she went out like the snuff of a candle, that being
the way sometimes with people who have never known an hour's
sickness. 'Am I really like that, Ebenezer?' she asked. 'In your
prime, my dear,' said I--she having married me late in life owing to
her romantic nature--'in your prime, my dear, I'll defy any one to
tell you and this party from two peas.' 'I wish I knew who she was,'
said my wife. 'Hadn't you best leave well alone?' said I; 'for I
declare till this moment I hadn't dreamed that another such woman as
yourself existed in the world, and it gives me a kind of bigamous
feeling which I can't say I find altogether unpleasant.' 'Then I'll
keep the thing,' says she, very positively, 'until the owner turns up
and redeems it;' which he never did, being, as I discovered, a
strolling portrait painter very much down on his luck. So there the
mystery remained. But (as I was telling you), though a first-rate
manager, my poor dear wife had a number of romantic notions; and
often she has said to me after I'd shut up shop, 'If wishes grew on
brambles, Ebenezer, it's not a pawnbroker's wife I'd be at this
moment.
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