_Mrs. N._ (_piqued_)--Well; Mr. Titmarsh will go with us.
At this puncture Miss Clarissa Newboy enters in a pink paletôt, trimmed with swansdown--looking like an angel--and we exchange glances of--what shall I say?--of sympathy on both parts, and consummate rapture on mine. But this is by-play.
_Mrs. N._--Good night, Frederic. I think we shall be late.
_Mr. N._--You won’t wake me, I daresay; and you don’t expect a public man to sit up.
_Mrs. N._--It’s not you, it’s the servants. Cocker sleeps very heavily. The maids are best in bed, and are all ill with the influenza. I say, Frederic dear, don’t you think you had better give me YOUR CHUBB KEY?
This astonishing proposal, which violates every recognised law of society--this demand which alters all the existing state of things--this fact of a woman asking for a door-key, struck me with a terror which I cannot describe, and impressed me with the fact of the vast progress of Our Street. The door-key! What would our grandmother, who dwelt in this place when it was a rustic suburb, think of its condition now, when husbands stay at home, and wives go abroad with the latch-key?
The evening at Lady Sowerby’s was the most delicious we have spent for long, long days.
Thus it will be seen that everybody of any consideration in Our Street takes a line. Mrs. Minimy (34) takes the homœopathic line, and has _soirées_ of doctors of that faith. Lady Pocklington takes the capitalist line; and those stupid and splendid dinners of hers are devoured by loan-contractors, and railroad princes. Mrs. Trimmer (38) comes out in the scientific line, and indulges us in rational evenings, where history is the lightest subject admitted, and geology and the sanitary condition of the metropolis form the general themes of conversation. Mrs. Brumby plays finely on the bassoon, and has evenings dedicated to Sebastian Bach, and enlivened with Handel. At Mrs. Maskleyn’s they are mad for charades and theatricals.
They performed last Christmas in a French piece, by Alexandre Dumas, I believe--“La Duchesse de Montefiasco,” of which I forget the plot, but everybody was in love with everybody else’s wife, except the hero, Don Alonzo, who was ardently attached to the Duchess, who turned out to be his grandmother. The piece was translated by Lord Fiddle-faddle, Tom Bulbul