LITMIR.BIZ

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of China standing by his elbow; and Lady Pennon cried out, with sympathetic anguish: 'Oh, my dear, what a trial for you!'

      'Brittle is foredoomed,' said Diana, unruffled.

      She deserved compliments, and would have had them if she had not wounded the most jealous and petulant of her courtiers.

      'Then the Turk is a sapient custodian!' said Westlake, vexed with her flush at the entrance of the Scot.

      Diana sedately took his challenge. 'We, Mr. Westlake, have the philosophy of ownership.'

      Mr. Hepburn penitentially knelt to pick up the fragments, and Westlake murmured over his head: 'As long as it is we who are the cracked.'

      'Did we not start from China?'

      'We were consequently precipitated to Stamboul.'

      'You try to elude the lesson.'

      'I remember my first paedagogue telling me so when he rapped the book on my cranium.'

      'The mark of the book is not a disfigurement.'

      It was gently worded, and the shrewder for it. The mark of the book, if not a disfigurement, was a characteristic of Westlake's fashion of speech. Whitmonby nodded twice, for signification of a palpable hit in that bout; and he noted within him the foolishness of obtruding the remotest allusion to our personality when crossing the foils with a woman. She is down on it like the lightning, quick as she is in her contracted circle, politeness guarding her from a riposte.

      Mr. Hepburn apologized very humbly, after regaining his chair. Diana smiled and said: 'Incidents in a drawing-room are prize-shots at Dulness.'

      'And in a dining-room too,' added Sullivan Smith. 'I was one day at a dinner-party, apparently of undertakers hired to mourn over the joints and the birds in the dishes, when the ceiling came down, and we all sprang up merry as crickets. It led to a pretty encounter and a real prize-shot.'

      'Does that signify a duel?' asked Lady Pennon.

      ''Twould be the vulgar title, to bring it into discredit with the populace, my lady.'

      'Rank me one of the populace then! I hate duelling and rejoice that it is discountenanced.'

      'The citizens, and not the populace, I think Mr. Sullivan Smith means,' Diana said. 'The citizen is generally right in morals. My father also was against the practice, when it raged at its "prettiest." I have heard him relate a story of a poor friend of his, who had to march out for a trifle, and said, as he accepted the invitation, "It's all nonsense!" and walking to the measured length, "It's all nonsense, you know!" and when lying on the ground, at his last gasp, "I told you it was all nonsense!"'

      Sullivan Smith leaned over to Whitmonby and Dacier amid the ejaculations, and whispered: 'A lady's way of telling the story!—and excuseable to her:—she had to Jonah the adjective. What the poor fellow said was—' He murmured the sixty-pounder adjective, as in the belly of the whale, to rightly emphasize his noun.

      Whitmonby nodded to the superior relish imparted by the vigour of masculine veracity in narration. 'A story for its native sauce piquante,' he said.

      'Nothing without it!'

      They had each a dissolving grain of contempt for women compelled by their delicacy to spoil that kind of story which demands the piquant accompaniment to flavour it racily and make it passable. For to see insipid mildness complacently swallowed as an excellent thing, knowing the rich smack of savour proper to the story, is your anecdotal gentleman's annoyance. But if the anecdote had supported him, Sullivan Smith would have let the expletive rest.

      Major Carew Mahoney capped Mrs. Warwick's tale of the unfortunate duellist with another, that confessed the practice absurd, though he approved of it; and he cited Lord Larrian's opinion: 'It keeps men braced to civil conduct.'

      'I would not differ with the dear old lord; but no! the pistol is the sceptre of the bully,' said Diana.

      Mr. Hepburn, with the widest of eyes on her in perpetuity, warmly agreed; and the man was notorious among men for his contrary action.

      'Most righteously our Princess Egeria distinguishes her reign by prohibiting it,' said Lady Singleby.

      'And how,' Sullivan Smith sighed heavily, 'how, I'd ask, are ladies to be protected from the bully?'

      He was beset: 'So it was all for us? all in consideration for our benefit?'

      He mournfully exclaimed: 'Why, surely!'

      'That is the funeral apology of the Rod, at the close of every barbarous chapter,' said Diana.

      'Too fine in mind, too fat in body; that is a consequence with men, dear madam. The conqueror stands to his weapons, or he loses his possessions.'

      'Mr. Sullivan Smith jumps at his pleasure from the special to the general, and will be back, if we follow him, Lady Pennon. It is the trick men charge to women, showing that they can resemble us.'

      Lady Pennon thumped her knee. 'Not a bit. There's no resemblance, and they know nothing of us.'

      'Women are a blank to them, I believe,' said Whitmonby, treacherously bowing;—and Westlake said:

      'Traces of a singular scrawl have been observed when they were held in close proximity to the fire.'

      'Once, on the top of a coach,' Whitmonby resumed, 'I heard a comely dame of the period when summers are ceasing threatened by her husband with a divorce, for omitting to put sandwiches in their luncheon-basket. She made him the inscrutable answer: "Ah, poor man! you will go down ignorant to your grave!" We laughed, and to this day I cannot tell you why.'

      'That laugh was from a basket lacking provision; and I think we could trace our separation to it,' Diana said to Lady Pennon, who replied: 'They expose themselves; they get no nearer to the riddle.'

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