Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/166

Rh Rome you only went to the Quirinal Wednesdays, because (whisper, whisper, whisper)—oh, indeed it is perfectly true—had it on the best authority—dreadful, incredible, but perfectly true!

In point of fact there is nothing it doesn't know.

Except, to be sure, it never knows that Mrs. Potiphar is not virtuous, or that Lady Messalina is not everything she should be; this it never knows and never admits, because if it did it could not very well drink the Potiphar champagne, and might lose for its daughters the Messalina balls. Indeed its perpetual loquacity, which is "as the waters come down at Lodore," has most solemn and impressive interludes of refreshing dumbness and deafness when any incautious speaker, not trained to its ways, hints that Mrs. Potiphar lives in a queer manner, or that Lady Messalina would be out of society anywhere else; then indeed does Anglo-Saxon Floralia draw itself up with an injured dignity, and rebuke you with the murmur of—Christian charity.

In other respects however it has the soul of Samuel Pepys multiplied by five thousand.