Page:Dickens - Our Mutual Friend, ed. Lang, 1897, vol.1.djvu/40

 "I assure you, my dear Veneering, that it is the oddest affair! Like the advertising people, I don't ask you to trust me, without offering a respectable reference. Mortimer there, is my reference, and knows all about it."

Mortimer raises his drooping eyelids, and slightly opens his mouth. But a faint smile, expressive of "What's the use!' passes over his face, and he drops his eyelids and shuts his mouth.

"Now, Mortimer," says Lady Tippins, rapping the sticks of her closed green fan upon the knuckles of her left hand which is particularly rich in knuckles, " I insist upon your telling all that is to be told about the man from Jamaica."

" Give you my honour I never heard of any man from Jamaica, except the man who was a brother," replies Mortimer.

"Tobago, then."

" Nor yet from Tobago. "

" Except, " Eugene strikes in: so unexpectedly that the mature young lady, who has forgotten all about him, with a start takes the epaulette out of his way; "except our friend who long lived on rice-pudding and isinglass, till at length to his something or other, his physician said something else, and a leg of mutton somehow ended in daygo. "

A reviving impression goes round the table that Eugene is coming out. An unfulfilled impression, for he goes in again.

" Now, my dear Mrs. Veneering, " quoth Lady Tippins, " I appeal to you whether this is not the basest conduct ever known in this world? I carry my lovers about, two or three at a time, on condition that they are very obedient and devoted; and here is my old lover-in-chief, the head of all my slaves, throwing off his allegiance before company! And here is another of my lovers, a rough Cymon at present, certainly, but of whom I had most hopeful expectations as to his turning out well in course of time, pretending that he can't remember his nursery rhymes! On purpose to annoy me, for he knows how I dote upon them! "

A grisly little fiction concerning her lovers is Lady