Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1920 J. W. Arrowsmith edition.

SKETCHES IN LAVENDER, BLUE AND GREEN
by Jerome K. Jerome

Contents:
Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad An item of Fashionable Intelligence
Blase Billy The Choice of Cyril Harjohn The Materialisation of Charles
and Mivanway Portrait of a Lady The Man Who Would Manage The
Man Who Lived For Others A Man of Habit The Absent-minded Man
A Charming Woman Whibley's Spirit The Man Who Went Wrong The
Hobby Rider The Man Who Did Not Believe In Luck Dick
Dunkerman's Cat The Minor Poet's Story The Degeneration of Thomas
Henry The City of The Sea Driftwood

La-ven-der's blue, did-dle, did-dle! La-ven-der's green; When I am king,
did-dle, did-dle! You shall be queen.
Call up your men, did-dle, did-dle! Set them to work; Some to the
plough, did-dle, did-dle! Some to the cart.
Some to make hay, did-dle, did-dle! Some to cut corn; While you and I,
did-dle, did-dle! Keep ourselves warm.

REGINALD BLAKE, FINANCIER AND CAD

The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly
defined, and act consistently. Nature, always inartistic, takes pleasure in
creating the impossible. Reginald Blake was as typical a specimen of
the well-bred cad as one could hope to find between Piccadilly Circus
and Hyde Park Corner. Vicious without passion, and possessing brain
without mind, existence presented to him no difficulties, while his
pleasures brought him no pains. His morality was bounded by the
doctor on the one side, and the magistrate on the other. Careful never to

outrage the decrees of either, he was at forty-five still healthy, though
stout; and had achieved the not too easy task of amassing a fortune
while avoiding all risk of Holloway. He and his wife, Edith (nee
Eppington), were as ill-matched a couple as could be conceived by any
dramatist seeking material for a problem play. As they stood before the
altar on their wedding morn, they might have been taken as
symbolising satyr and saint. More than twenty years his junior,
beautiful with the beauty of a Raphael's Madonna, his every touch of
her seemed a sacrilege. Yet once in his life Mr. Blake played the part of
a great gentleman; Mrs. Blake, on the same occasion, contenting herself
with a singularly mean role--mean even for a woman in love.
The affair, of course, had been a marriage of convenience. Blake, to do
him justice, had made no pretence to anything beyond admiration and
regard. Few things grow monotonous sooner than irregularity. He
would tickle his jaded palate with respectability, and try for a change
the companionship of a good woman. The girl's face drew him, as the
moonlight holds a man who, bored by the noise, turns from a heated
room to