“Haven’t you heard?” exclaimed Savage. “Why Sawyer’s married, poor fellow! Married pretty Cissy Dove, that flirting girl, who used to look so well on a chestnut horse. You must remember Cissy Dove. Why, there’s the very horse going up to the hammer with Sawyer’s lot. I suppose she’s given up riding now—got something else to do.”
Sure enough there was the late Miss Dove’s exceedingly clever palfrey, looking fat and in good case, as horses always do when they are “to be sold without reserve.” There was Wood-Pigeon, twice his hunting size. There was the brown and the grey, and one I didn’t know, and Jack-a-Dandy himself, submitting, not very patiently, to the attentions of a villainous-looking man in dirty-white cords, who was coughing him and punching him, and feeling his legs, and narrowly escaped having his brains knocked out for his pains.
I turned to moralise with Savage, but he was gone. You never can speak to anybody in London for more than five minutes together, and I walked out of the yard musing upon man’s weakness and woman’s power, on the uncertain tenure by which a bachelor holds his freedom, on the common lot, and how nobody is safe. “I never would have believed it of Sawyer,” methought, as I turned meditatively into Piccadilly; but then I did not know he had been out gathering violets in seductive company, with his arm in a sling.
Turning into Sam’s Library, with intent to secure a stall at the French play for my niece, I politely awaited the leisure of a very smartly-dressed lady examining the plan of the Opera House, and bending studiously over the same at the counter. Her cavalier, a thick-set man, attired with considerable splendour, was engrossed in a volume which he had taken up, as it would appear, to wile away a long and tedious interval of consultation between his companion and the shopman. The lady looked up first, and under her little white bonnet with its innocent bride-like lilies-of-the-valley, I discovered a pretty dark-eyed face, such as ere this has tempted many a son of Adam, forgetful of his progenitor’s mishaps, into the commission of matrimony.
“An’t you ready yet?” she inquired, addressing her cavalier with just the slightest possible turn of asperity, to give piquancy, as it were, to the dregs of honey still remaining from the moon. “An’t you ready?” she repeated in a sharper key, perceiving the student so engrossed as to be unconscious of her observation. This time there was more of the vinegar and less of the honey, and he started to “attention” forthwith.