"It is devilish strange,--woman, lovely woman!" Here he filled and drank again, as though he had been proposing a toast for his own peculiar drinking.
"I say, now," resumed Power, catching at once that there was something working in his mind,--"I say, now, how happened it that you, a right good-looking, soldier-like fellow, that always made his way among the fair ones, with that confounded roguish eye and slippery tongue,--how the deuce did it come to pass that you never married ?" "I've been more than once on the verge of it," said the adjutant, smiling blandly at the flattery.
"And nae bad notion yours just to stay there," said the doctor, with a very peculiar contortion of countenance.
"No pleasing you, no contenting a fellow like you," said Power, returning to the charge; "that's the thing; you get a certain ascendancy; you have a kind of success that renders you, as the French say, _tete montee_, and you think no woman rich enough or good-looking enough or big enough." "No; by Jove you're wrong," said the adjutant, swallowing the bait, hook and all,--"quite wrong there; for some how, all my life, I was decidedly susceptible.

Not that I cared much for your blushing sixteen, or budding beauties in white muslin, fresh from a back-board and a governess; no, my taste inclined rather to the more sober charms of two or three-and-thirty, the _embonpoint_, a good foot and ankle, a sensible breadth about the shoulders--" "Somewhat Dutch-like, I take it," said the skipper, puffing out a volume of smoke; "a little bluff in the bows, and great stowage, eh ?" "You leaned then towards the widows ?" said Power.
"Exactly; I confess, a widow always was my weakness.

There was something I ever liked in the notion of a woman who had got over all the awkward girlishness of early years, and had that self-possession which habit and knowledge of the world confer, and knew enough of herself to understand what she really wished, and where she would really go." "Like the trade winds," puffed the skipper.
"Then, as regards fortune, they have a decided superiority over the spinster class.

I defy any man breathing,--let him be half police-magistrate, half chancellor,--to find out the figure of a young lady's dower.

On your first introduction to the house, some kind friend whispers, 'Go it, old boy; forty thousand, not a penny less.' A few weeks later, as the siege progresses, a maiden aunt, disposed to puffing, comes down to twenty; this diminishes again one half, but then 'the money is in bank stock, hard Three-and-a-Half.' You go a little farther, and as you sit one day over your wine with papa, he certainly promulgates the fact that his daughter has five thousand pounds, two of which turn out to be in Mexican bonds, and three in an Irish mortgage." "Happy for you," interrupted Power, "that it be not in Galway, where a proposal to foreclose, would be a signal for your being called out and shot without benefit of clergy." "Bad luck to it, for Galway," said the adjutant.