While these solemnities were in progress, Mr. Alfred Lammle (most loving of husbands) approached the chair of Mrs. Alfred Lammle (most loving of wives), and bending over the back of it, trifled for some few seconds with Mrs. Lammle’s bracelet. Slightly in contrast with this brief airy toying, one might have noticed a certain dark attention in Mrs. Lammle’s face as she said some words with her eyes on Mr. Lammle’s waistcoat, and seemed in return to receive some lesson. But it was all done as a breath passes from a mirror.
And now, the grand chain riveted to the last link, the discreet automaton ceased, and the sixteen, two and two, took a walk among the furniture. And herein the unconsciousness of the Ogre Grompus was pleasantly conspicuous; for, that complacent monster, believing that he was giving Miss Podsnap a treat, prolonged to the utmost stretch of possibility a peripatetic account of an archery meeting; while his victim, heading the procession of sixteen as it slowly circled about, like a revolving funeral, never raised her eyes except once to steal a glance at Mrs. Lammle, expressive of intense despair.
At length the procession was dissolved by the violent arrival of a nutmeg, before which the drawing-room door bounced open as if it were a cannonball; and while that fragrant article, dispersed through several glasses of coloured warm water, was going the round of society, Miss Podsnap returned to her seat by her new friend.
“Oh my goodness,” said Miss Podsnap. “that’s over! I hope you didn’t look at me.”
“My dear, why not?”
“Oh I know all about myself,” said Miss Podsnap.
“I’ll tell you something I know about you, my dear,” returned Mrs. Lammle in her winning way, “and that is, you are most unnecessarily shy.”
“Ma ain’t,” said Miss Podsnap. “—I detest you! Go along!” This shot was levelled under her breath at the gallant Grompus for bestowing an insinuating smile upon her in passing.
“Pardon me if I scarcely see, my dear Miss Podsnap,” Mrs. Lammle was beginning when the young lady interposed.
“If we are going to be real friends (and I suppose we are, for you are the only person who ever proposed it) don’t let us be awful. It’s awful enough to be Miss Podsnap, without being called so. Call me Georgiana.”
“Dearest Georgiana,” Mrs. Lammle began again.
“Thank you,” said Miss Podsnap.
“Dearest Georgiana, pardon me if I scarcely see, my love, why your mamma’s not being shy, is a reason why you should be.”
“Don’t you really see that?” asked Miss Podsnap, plucking at her fingers in a troubled manner, and furtively casting her eyes now on Mrs. Lammle, now on the ground. “Then perhaps it isn’t?”
“My dearest Georgiana, you defer much too readily to my poor opinion. Indeed it is not even an opinion, darling, for it is only a confession of my dullness.”
“Oh you are not dull,” returned Miss Podsnap. “I am dull, but you couldn’t have made me talk if you were.”
Some little touch of conscience answering this perception of her having gained a purpose, called bloom enough into Mrs. Lammle’s face to make it look brighter as she sat smiling her best smile on her dear Georgiana, and shaking her head with an affectionate playfulness. Not that it meant anything, but that Georgiana seemed to like it.
“What I mean is,” pursued Georgiana, “that Ma being so endowed with awfulness, and Pa being so endowed with awfulness, and there being so much awfulness everywhere—I mean, at least, everywhere where I am—perhaps it makes me who am so deficient in awfulness, and frightened at it—I say it very badly—I don’t know whether you can understand what I mean?”
“Perfectly, dearest Georgiana!” Mrs. Lammle was proceeding with every reassuring wile, when the head of that young lady suddenly went back against the wall again and her eyes closed.
“Oh there’s Ma being awful with somebody with a glass in his eye! Oh I know she’s going to bring him here! Oh don’t bring him, don’t bring him! Oh he’ll be my partner with his glass in his eye! Oh what shall I do!” This time Georgiana accompanied her ejaculations with taps of her feet upon the floor, and was altogether in quite a desperate condition. But, there was no escape from the majestic Mrs. Podsnap’s production of an ambling stranger, with one eye screwed up into extinction and the other framed and glazed, who, having looked down out of that organ, as if he descried Miss Podsnap at the bottom of some perpendicular shaft, brought her to the surface, and ambled off with her. And then the captive at the piano played another “set,” expressive of his mournful aspirations after freedom, and other sixteen went through the former melancholy motions, and the ambler took Miss Podsnap for a furniture walk, as if he had struck out an entirely original conception.
In the meantime a stray personage of a meek demeanour, who had wandered to the hearthrug and got among the heads of tribes assembled there in conference with Mr. Podsnap, eliminated Mr. Podsnap’s flush and flourish by a highly unpolite remark; no less than a reference to the circumstance that some half-dozen people had lately died in the streets, of starvation. It was clearly ill-timed after dinner. It was not adapted to the cheek of the young person. It was not in good taste.
“I don’t believe it,” said Mr. Podsnap, putting it behind him.
The meek man was afraid we must take it as proved, because there were the inquests and the Registrar’s returns.
“Then it was their own fault,” said Mr. Podsnap.
Veneering and other elders of tribes commended this way out of it. At once a shortcut and a broad road.
The man of meek demeanour intimated that truly it would seem from the facts, as if starvation had been forced upon the
