Page:Romance & Reality 1.pdf/131

Rh heard a little child say, "Oh, mamma, I always speak to Mrs. S. in such dictionary words!" "Slowly and sadly" did the morning pass. Alas! for the victim of friendship, whom sentiment or silliness seduces into passing a long day! The upright sitting on the repulsive sofa—the mental exhaustion in searching after topics of conversation, which, like the breeze in Byron's description of a calm, "come not"—the gossip that, out of sheer desperation, darkens into scandal; if ever friends or feelings are sacrificed under temptation too strong to be resisted, it is in the conversational pauses of a long day; and worst of all, a long day between people who have scarcely an idea or an acquaintance in common, for the one to be exchanged, or the other abused—communication or condemnation equally out of the question. Mrs. Smithson secretly pitied herself for wasting her colloquial powers on that social non-entity, a young lady; and Miss Arundel was somewhat bewildered by the march of her former friend's intellect. Divers of those elegant harmonies, which make musical the flight of time in London, verified the old rhyme, that