The oysters eaten, Betty congratulated herself that Jack felt more cheerful. Not a bit of it. While she stood, like a hen on one leg, waiting for him to "settle" at the clerk's desk, he remarked to the latter, in a melancholy, commiserating tone, "Your situation here must be a very tiresome and confining one; don't you find it so?"--"Not at all," replied the clerk, blandly; "quite the contrary."--"Do you ever have a holiday; do you have Sundays?" asked Jack.--"Always when I wish," replied the clerk; "but I don't care to be away much. I see the best people in the city here, and I have a great deal of good conversation." Betty smiled inwardly. It was not in human nature--certainly not in female human nature--to refrain from crowing a little over what she considered Jack's Quixotic philanthropy; and when she laughed at his waste of pity, in this case, that infatuated man replied, "Is it possible you can make merry over it, Betty? Why, to _my_ mind, his not '_caring_ for holidays' was the most melancholy feature of the whole thing; as showing how perfectly benumbed he must be, by such heartless exaction on the part of his employer."--"But you don't know anything about his employer," said Betty; "and it is evident that he _could_ go out, any day he wished." Jack shrugged his shoulders, and replied, "Ah, yes--I know what that '_could_' means, when a man's nature is yielding; ah--yes," and he gave another deep sigh. "Well," said Betty, getting a little irritated, "_I_ don't know what _you_ may think, but if my fellow-creatures are perfectly satisfied with their lot in life, I for one am not going to try to make them miserable about it." Whereupon Jack preached her a long lecture on the sin of selfishness, which quite stopped the process of oyster digestion, and sent her to bed to enjoy the horrors of a well-earned nightmare.
Once, when Betty and Jack were travelling, they stopped at a fine hotel. Everything was as perfect as skill and system could make it. Jack paid the bill, and Betty launched out in praise of the establishment. "Yes," said Jack, his face lengthening; "but I am afraid that landlord feeds his guests much better than he can afford. I don't think he charged as much as he ought in that bill of ours. I really feel as if he had cheated himself." Now, Betty's experience in this regard was entirely antagonistic to Jack's, so she replied, with an ironical and not very amiable expression, "that if the gift of a ten-dollar bill to the landlord would lighten her brother's conscience, she would be willing to engage that the former would by no means take offence at it."