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I
may have been born to be a benefactor to you by sometimes giving
you an opportunity of assisting me in my little perplexities. Why
should I regret my incapacity for details and worldly affairs when
it leads to such pleasant consequences? I don't regret it
therefore."

Of all his playful speeches (playful, yet always fully meaning what
they expressed) none seemed to be more to the taste of Mr. Jarndyce
than this. I had often new temptations, afterwards, to wonder
whether it was really singular, or only singular to me, that he,
who was probably the most grateful of mankind upon the least
occasion, should so desire to escape the gratitude of others.

We were all enchanted. I felt it a merited tribute to the engaging
qualities of Ada and Richard that Mr. Skimpole, seeing them for the
first time, should be so unreserved and should lay himself out to
be so exquisitely agreeable. They (and especially Richard) were
naturally pleased, for similar reasons, and considered it no common
privilege to be so freely confided in by such an attractive man.
The more we listened, the more gaily Mr. Skimpole talked. And what
with his fine hilarious manner and his engaging candour and his
genial way of lightly tossing his own weaknesses about, as if he
had said, "I am a child, you know! You are designing people
compared with me" (he really made me consider myself in that light)
"but I am gay and innocent; forget your worldly arts and play with
me!" the effect was absolutely dazzling.

He was so full of feeling too and had such a delicate sentiment for
what was beautiful or tender that he could have won a heart by that
alone. In the evening, when I was preparing to make tea and Ada
was touching the piano in the adjoining room and softly humming a
tune to her cousin Richard, which they had happened to mention, he
came and sat down on the sofa near me and so spoke of Ada that I
almost loved him.

"She is like the morning," he said. "With that golden hair, those
blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheek, she is like the
summer morning. The birds here will mistake her for it. We will
not call such a lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all
mankind, an orphan. She is the child of the universe."

Mr. Jarndyce, I found, was standing near us with his hands behind
him and an attentive smile upon his face.

"The universe," he observed, "makes rather an indifferent parent, I
am afraid."

"Oh! I don't know!" cried Mr. Skimpole buoyantly.

"I think I do know," said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Well!" cried Mr. Skimpole. "You know the world (which in your
sense is the universe), and I know nothing of it, so you shall have
your way. But if I had mine," glancing at the cousins, "there
should be no brambles of sordid realities in such a path as that.
It should be strewn with roses; it should lie through bowers, where
there was no spring, autumn, nor winter, but perpetual summer. Age
or change should never wither it. The base word money should never
be breathed near it!"

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