Page:Mrs Caudle's curtain lectures.djvu/214

 178 "Very well. Now I want to ask you one question more. Eh?

"You want to ask me one?

"Very well—go on—I'm not afraid to be catechised. I never dropped a syllable that as a wife I ought to have kept to myself—no, I'm not at all forgetting what I've said—and whatever you've got to ask me speak out at once. No—I don't want you to spare me; all I want you is to speak.

"You will speak?

"Well then, do.

"What?

"Who told people you'd a false front tooth?

"And is that all? Well, I'm sure—as if the world couldn't see it. I know I did just mention it once, but then I thought everybody knew it—besides, I was aggravated to do it; yes, aggravated. I remember it was that very day, at Mrs. Badgerly's, when husbands' whiskers came up. Well, after we'd done with them, somebody said something about teeth. Whereupon, Miss Prettyman—a minx! she was born to destroy the peace of families, I know she was: she was there; and if I'd only known that such a creature was—no I'm not rambling, not at all, and I'm coming to the tooth. To be sure, this is a great deal you've got against me, isn't it? Well, somebody spoke about teeth, when Miss Prettyman, with one of her insulting leers, said 'she thought Mr. Caudle had the whitest teeth she ever had beheld.' Of course my blood was up—every wife's would be: and I believe I might have said, 'Yes, they were well enough; but when a young lady so very much praised a married man's teeth, she perhaps didn't know that one of the front ones was an elephant's.' Like her