Page:Herbert Jenkins - The Rain Girl.djvu/95

 Drewitt gloomily; "if we didn't know them, we might adopt them as friends, and only find out our mistake when it was too late."

"But why trouble about marrying?" asked Beresford. "You can rub along fairly well on two thousand a year."

"Rub along," retorted Drewitt in a voice that contained something of feeling, "I can rub along: but I have to marry and produce little Drewitts for the sake of the title. I can't go round with a barrel-piano, I should be bound to catch cold; besides, I have no sense of rhythm."

Beresford laughed at the expression of unutterable gloom upon his cousin's face.

"To throw a man upon the tender mercies of the world as the third peer of a line is a shameful and humiliating act."

Drewitt gazed reflectively at the cigarette he had just selected from his case. Striking a match, he lighted it with great deliberation.

"All titles," he continued, "like the evening papers, should begin at the fourth issue, and then there might be a sort of final night edition, after which the line would become extinct."

"But how" began Beresford.

Drewitt motioned him to silence.

"There would be some virtue in being the seventh Baron Drewitt," he explained. "A seventh baron might have traditions, a family ghost, a picture gallery of acquired ancestors. These are the things which make a Family. No family should be admitted