When Mr. Hutchinson. Port, a single gentleman who admitted that he was
forty-seven years old and who actually was rising sixty, of strongly
fixed personal habits, and with the most positive opinions upon every
conceivable subject, came to know that by the death of his widowed
sister he had been placed in the position of guardian of that sister’s
only daughter, Dorothy, his promptly formed and tersely expressed
conception of the situation was that the agency by which it had been
brought about was distinctively diabolical. The fact may be added that
during the subsequent brief term of his guardianship Mr. Port found no
more reason for reversing this hastily formed opinion than did the late
King David for reversing his hastily expressed views in regard to the
general tendency of mankind towards untruthfulness.
The two redeeming features of Mr. Port’s trying situation were that his
duties as a guardian did not begin at all until his very unnecessary
ward was nearly nineteen years old; and did not begin actively--his
ward having elected to remain in France for a season, under the mild
direction of the elderly cousin who had been her mother’s travelling
companion--until she was almost twenty. When she was one-and-twenty, as
Mr. Port reflected with much satisfaction, he would be rid of her.
Neither by nature nor by education had Mr. Hutchinson Port been fitted
to discharge the duties which thus were thrust upon him. His
disposition was introspective--but less in a philosophical sense than a
physiological, for the central point of his introspection was his
liver. That he made something of a fetich of this organ will not appear
surprising when the fact is stated that Mr. Port was a Philadelphian.
In that city of eminent good cheer livers are developed to a degree that
only Strasburg can emulate.
Naturally, Mr. Port’s views of life were bounded, more or less, by what
he could eat with impunity; yet beyond this somewhat contracted region
his thoughts strayed pleasantly afield into the far wider region of the
things which he could not eat with impunity; but which, with a truly
Spartan epicureanism, he did eat--and bravely accepted the bilious
consequences! The slightly anxious, yet determined, expression that
would appear upon Mr. Port’s cleanshaven, ruddy countenance as he
settled himself to the discussion of an especially good and especially
dangerous dinner betrayed heroic possibilities in his nature which,
being otherwise directed, would have won for him glory upon the martial
field.
In minor matters--that is to say, in all relations of life not
pertaining to eating--Mr. Port was very much what was to be expected
of him from his birth and from his environment. Every Sunday, with an
exemplary piety, he sat solitary in the great square pew in St. Peter’s
which had been occupied by successive generations of Ports ever since
the year 1761, when the existing church was completed. Every other day
of the week, from his late breakfast-time for some hours onward, he sat
at his own particular window of the Philadelphia Club and contemplated
disparagingly the outside world over the top of his magazine or
newspaper. At four, precisely, for his liver’s sake, he rode in the
Park; and for so stout a gentleman Mr. Port was an excellent horseman.
[Illustration: Mr. Port was an excellent horseman 024]
On rare occasions he dined at his club. Usually, he dined out; for while
generally regarded as a very disagreeable person at dinners--because of
his habit of finding fault with his food on the dual ground of hygiene
and quality--he was in social demand because his presence at a
dinner was a sure indication that the giver of it had a good culinary
reputation; and in Philadelphia such a reputation is most highly prized.
An irrelevant New York person, after meeting Mr. Port at several of the
serious dinnerparties peculiar to Philadelphia, had described him as the
animated skeleton; and had supplemented this discourteous remark with
the still more discourteous observation that as a feature of a feast the
Egyptian article was to be preferred--because it did not overeat itself,
and did keep its mouth shut. However, Mr. Port’s obvious rotundity
destroyed what little point was to be found in this meagre witticism;
and, if it had not, the fact is well-known in Philadelphia that New
Yorkers, being descended not from an honorable Quaker ancestry but from
successful operations in Wall Street, are not to be held accountable for
their unfortunate but unavoidable manifestations of a frivolity at once
inelegant and indecorous.
In regard to his summers, Mr. Port--after a month spent for the good of
his liver in taking the waters at the White Sulphur--of course went to
Narragan-sett Pier. It may be accepted as an incontrovertible truth that
a Philadelphian of a certain class who missed coming to the Pier
for August would refuse to believe, for that year at least, in the
alternation of the four seasons; while an enforced absence from that
damply delightful watering-place for two successive summers very
probably would lead to a rejection of the entire Copernican system.