Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/140

 Lily Dale is plaintively sympathetic on the subject of the sorrows of men through the vexations of their amusements:

"Women must amuse themselves, except for an annual treat or two. But the catering for men's sport is never ending, and is always paramount to everything else. And yet the pet game of the day never goes off properly. In partridge time, the partridges are wild and won't come to be killed. In hunting time, the foxes won't run straight,—the wretches. They show no spirit, and will take to ground to save their brushes. Then comes a nipping frost, and skating is proclaimed; but the ice is always rough, and the woodcocks have deserted the country. And as for salmon,—when the summer comes round I do really believe that they suffer a great deal about the salmon. I am sure they never catch any. So they go back to their clubs and their cards, and abuse their cooks and blackball their friends."

As to the adorable, captivating kind, she is not too sanguine:

"The Apollos of the world * * * who are so full of feeling, so soft-natured, so kind, who never say a cross word, who never get out of bed on the wrong side in the morning,—it so often turns out that they won't wash."

Of Lucy Robarts Trollope himself speaks with justifiable pride, and says he does not see "how any character could be more natural than she." She is indeed a sunny, breezy, English maid, endowed with charm, enterprise, and a resourcefulness that could outwit with dignity the titled dowager who did not want to be her mother-in-law. But her chief distinction, in which she is more unusual than "natural," is the possession of that kind of humor defined by Howells as "the cry of pain of a well-bred man." When her pride is wounded, her love baffled, her happiness ap-*