Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/98

Rh everybody has stocks or shares in something somewhere; but the news is Gossip,—dear delicious perennial ever-blessed gossip, that reports a beloved friend in difficulties, a rival in extremis, a neighbour no better than she should be, and some exalted personage or another caught hiding a king in his sleeve at cards, or kissing his wife's lady-of-the-bedchamber.

Gossip goes the round of the city in winter as the lemonade stands do in summer.

If you wish to be choyé and asked out every night, learn to manufacture it; it is very easy: take equal parts of flower of malice and essence of impudence, with several pepper-corns of improbability to spice it, some candied lemon-peel of moral reflections, and a few drops of the ammonia of indecency that will make it light of digestion, and the toothsome morsel will procure you welcome everywhere. If you can also chop up any real Paschal lamb of innocence in very fine pieces, so that it is minced and hashed and unrecognisable for ever, serve the mince with the vinegar of malignity, and the fresh mint of novelty, and you will be the very Carême