Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/709

. 22, 1860.] THE SILVER CORD.

“ breakfast, at your earliest convenience, Mrs. Hawkesley,” said her husband, who, in an exceedingly comfortable easy chair, was making himself master of the forty-eight columns of close reading, acquaintance with which has become the rule of daily life for every man who supposes himself to be civilised, and fit for intercourse with the world. Who says that this is not a reading age? Somebody who utters his thoughts without due consideration. A gentleman who fairly reads his newspaper every day, gets through, almost as matter of amusement, more study of condensed matter in a week than any helluo librorum, whose omnivorous digestion of books continues on record in servile biographies, ever could have performed in ten times that period. Let us stand up for ourselves, and not be overriden by the fabulists.

“Well, what is your hurry?” said his smiling and still handsome wife, née Beatrice Vernon, who had just come down, looking exceedingly fresh and cheerful, as the British matron should look in the mornings. That simple, ample dress, plain in its neatness, was expressly invented to complete the idea of home. It is a dress, mind, and not a wrap, or anything that means slipping down to breakfast anyhow, and attending to one’s toilette afterwards, as the manner of some is.

“I’m never in a hurry, Betty, but look at the clock.”

“The clock’s wrong, and we were late last night, and we are half an hour earlier than yesterday, when you made no complaint, and I won’t be called Betty,” said Mrs. Hawkesley, pleading several matters, as the lawyers say, and giving her lord the tiniest blow on the ear as she passed him to her place at the table.

“Make the coffee good, and I will condone that assault,” said Charles Hawkesley, “but not otherwise. There are some awful warnings to bad wives in to-day’s accounts from the divorce court.”

“There are no bad wives,” replied Mrs. Hawkesley; “and if there are they are made so by their husbands. Is there anything interesting?”

“An earthquake in Java has destroyed several towns, and about ten thousand people.”

“Nonsense about earthquakes—what do I care about earthquakes.”

“If some people continue to increase in size as they are doing,” said Mr. Hawkesley, with an affectation of mumbling to himself, “the subject may not be so uninteresting to some other persons, one of these days.”

“It’s a great story, and don’t you be impertinent, sir. Mrs. Orbit says I am a great deal