David appeared to be feeling tolerable cheerful, as if
saying to himself, "They're going to do something now, sure." They
sat down by the window, and Madame Bill was speaking:
"Stevey Todd," she says, "I think it would not be such advantage,
not at all. Because it is not good to my looks that I become two
hundred pounds like my Bill, and if now I have a husband who cook so
delicious, so perfect, as you, and who make me laugh between meals
without rest and without pity, as you, which gives the appetite
enormous, so that I have gained five pounds since I weigh before, and
by this am alarmed, disconsolate, helas! what do I do? Am I elephants
in this show? But how? I observe you do not ask that I marry you, but
you say, 'It is a good time to talk here or there, about this or that
--eh? Well, perhaps about matrimony." Haw! haw! ho! ho! But how so? If
you do not say, 'Will you?' how can I say 'No'?"
"Taking that argument so stated," says Stevey Todd, "it might be
called a tidy argument and no harm done, or you might say there was
two arguments in it. Now, taking the first one, a man might make this
point as bearing on it: for you take the tin-typist, who's a good
eater and a well-fleshed man, and yet he's a gloomy man, as you might
say, not putting it too strong; and on the other hand here's David,
who's what you'd call a joking dog, and as an eater without an equal
of his size, though an elderly dog, and yet he's a thin dog, as his
business in the show makes needful for him.
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