Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
As for Goff, he has a huge shining bald forehead, and immense bristling
Indian-red whiskers. He wears white wash-leather gloves, drinks fairly,
likes a rubber, and has a story for after dinner, beginning, “Doctor, ye
racklackt Sandy M'Lellan, who joined us in the West Indies. Wal, sir,”
etc. These and little Cutler made up the party.
Now it may not have struck all readers, but any sharp fellow conversant
with writing must have found out long ago, that if there had been
something exceedingly interesting to narrate with regard to this dinner
at Frank Berry's, I should have come out with it a couple of pages
since, nor have kept the public looking for so long a time at the
dish-covers and ornaments of the table.
But the simple fact must now be told, that there was nothing of the
slightest importance occurred at this repast, except that it gave me an
opportunity of studying Mrs. Berry in many different ways; and, in spite
of the extreme complaisance which she now showed me, of forming, I am
sorry to say, a most unfavourable opinion of that fair lady. Truth to
tell, I would much rather she should have been civil to Mrs. Muchit,
than outrageously complimentary to your humble servant; and as she
professed not to know what on earth there was for dinner, would it not
have been much more natural for her not to frown, and bob, and wink,
and point, and pinch her lips as often as Monsieur Anatole, her French
domestic, not knowing the ways of English dinner-tables, placed anything
out of its due order? The allusions to Boodle Hall were innumerable,
and I don't know any greater bore than to be obliged to talk of a place
which belongs to one's elder brother. Many questions were likewise asked
about the dowager and her Scotch relatives, the Plumduffs, about whom
Lady Pash knew a great deal, having seen them at Court and at Lord
Melville's. Of course she had seen them at Court and at Lord Melville's,
as she might have seen thousands of Scotchmen besides; but what mattered
it to me, who care not a jot for old Lady Fitz-Boodle? “When you write,
you'll say you met an old friend of her Ladyship's,” says Mrs. Berry,
and I faithfully promised I would when I wrote; but if the New Post
Office paid us for writing letters (as very possibly it will soon), I
could not be bribed to send a line to old Lady Fitz.
In a word, I found that Berry, like many simple fellows before him, had
made choice of an imperious, ill-humoured, and underbred female for a
wife, and could see with half an eye that he was a great deal too much
her slave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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