“I am foolish to give way to faintness,” Miss Tox faltered. “I shall be better presently.”
“You will be better presently, Lucretia!” repeated Mrs. Chick, with exceeding scorn. “Do you suppose I am blind? Do you imagine I am in my second childhood? No, Lucretia! I am obliged to you!”
Miss Tox directed an imploring, helpless kind of look towards her friend, and put her handkerchief before her face.
“If anyone had told me this yesterday,” said Mrs. Chick, with majesty, “or even half-an-hour ago, I should have been tempted, I almost believe, to strike them to the earth. Lucretia Tox, my eyes are opened to you all at once. The scales:” here Mrs. Chick cast down an imaginary pair, such as are commonly used in grocers’ shops: “have fallen from my sight. The blindness of my confidence is past, Lucretia. It has been abused and played upon, and evasion is quite out of the question now, I assure you.”
“Oh! to what do you allude so cruelly, my love?” asked Miss Tox, through her tears.
“Lucretia,” said Mrs. Chick, “ask your own heart. I must entreat you not to address me by any such familiar term as you have just used, if you please. I have some self-respect left, though you may think otherwise.”
“Oh, Louisa!” cried Miss Tox. “How can you speak to me like that?”
“How can I speak to you like that?” retorted Mrs. Chick, who, in default of having any particular argument to sustain herself upon, relied principally on such repetitions for her most withering effects. “Like that! You may well say like that, indeed!”
Miss Tox sobbed pitifully.
“The idea!” said Mrs. Chick, “of your having basked at my brother’s fireside, like a serpent, and wound yourself, through me, almost into his confidence, Lucretia, that you might, in secret, entertain designs upon him, and dare to aspire to contemplate the possibility of his uniting himself to you! Why, it is an idea,” said Mrs. Chick, with sarcastic dignity, “the absurdity of which almost relieves its treachery.”
“Pray, Louisa,” urged Miss Tox, “do not say such dreadful things.”
“Dreadful things!” repeated Mrs. Chick. “Dreadful things! Is it not a fact, Lucretia, that you have just now been unable to command your feelings even before me, whose eyes you had so completely closed?”
“I have made no complaint,” sobbed Miss Tox. “I have said nothing. If I have been a little overpowered by your news, Louisa, and have ever had any lingering thought that Mr. Dombey was inclined to be particular towards me, surely you will not condemn me.”
“She is going to say,” said Mrs. Chick, addressing herself to the whole of the furniture, in a comprehensive glance of resignation and appeal, “She is going to say—I know it—that I have encouraged her!”
“I don’t wish to exchange reproaches, dear Louisa,” sobbed Miss Tox. “Nor do I wish to complain. But, in my own defence—”
“Yes,” cried Mrs. Chick, looking round the room with a prophetic smile, “that’s what she’s going to say. I knew it. You had better say it. Say it openly! Be open, Lucretia Tox,” said Mrs. Chick, with desperate sternness, “whatever you are.”
“In my own defence,” faltered Miss Tox, “and only in my own defence against your unkind words, my dear Louisa, I would merely ask you if you haven’t often favoured such a fancy, and even said it might happen, for anything we could tell?”
“There is a point,” said Mrs. Chick, rising, not as if she were going to stop at the floor, but as if she were about to soar up, high, into her native skies, “beyond which endurance becomes ridiculous, if not culpable. I can bear much; but not too much. What spell was on me when I came into this house this day, I don’t know; but I had a presentiment—a dark presentiment,” said Mrs. Chick, with a shiver, “that something was going to happen. Well may I have had that foreboding, Lucretia, when my confidence of many years is destroyed in an instant, when my eyes are opened all at once, and when I find you revealed in your true colours. Lucretia, I have been mistaken in you. It is better for us both that this subject should end here. I wish you well, and I shall ever wish you well. But, as an individual who desires to be true to herself in her own poor position, whatever that position may be, or may not be—and as the sister of my brother—and as the sister-in-law of my brother’s wife—and as a connection by marriage of my brother’s wife’s mother—may I be permitted to add, as a Dombey?—I can wish you nothing else but good morning.”
These words, delivered with cutting suavity, tempered and chastened by a lofty air of moral rectitude, carried the speaker to the door. There she inclined her head in a ghostly and statue-like manner, and so withdrew to her carriage, to seek comfort and consolation in the arms of Mr. Chick, her lord.
Figuratively speaking, that is to say; for the arms of Mr. Chick were full of his newspaper. Neither did that gentleman address his eyes towards his wife otherwise than by stealth. Neither did he offer any consolation whatever. In short, he sat reading, and humming fag ends of tunes, and sometimes glancing furtively at her without delivering himself of a word, good, bad, or indifferent.
In the meantime Mrs. Chick sat swelling and bridling, and tossing her head, as if she were still repeating that solemn formula of farewell to Lucretia Tox. At length, she said aloud, “Oh the extent to which her eyes had been opened that day!”
“To which your eyes have been opened, my dear!” repeated Mr. Chick.
“Oh, don’t talk to me!” said Mrs. Chick. “If you can bear to see me in this state, and not ask me what the matter is, you had better hold your tongue forever.”
“What is the matter, my dear?” asked Mr. Chick.
“To think,” said Mrs. Chick, in a state
