“I libel—­I assert!” said the old lady-like little man; “not I!—­every body says so!”

“You may laugh,” replied my mentor and tormentor combined, “but personality can be proved against you; and all the friends and relations of Mr. Flaw declare you meant the bad man of your book for him.”

“His friends and relations are too kind to him.”

“Then you have an irregular character in your book, and Mrs. Blemish’s extensive circle of intimates assert that nothing can be more pointed than your allusion to her conduct and her character.”

“And pray what do these persons say about it themselves?”

“They are outrageous, and go about the town absolutely wild.”

“Fitting the caps on themselves?”

The little scarecrow shook his head once more; and declaring that we should see he had spoken too true, departed, and then lamented so fluently to every body the certainty of our being cut, that every body began to believe him.

I have hinted that my bonnets and my husband’s plate occasioned heartburnings:  no—­that is not a correct term, the heart has nothing to do with such exhalations—­bile collects elsewhere.

Those who had conspired to pull my husband from the throne of his popularity, because their parties excited in us no party spirit, and we abstained from hopping at their hops, found, to their consternation, that when the novelty of my novel misdemeanour was at an end, we went on as if nothing had occurred.  However, they still possessed heaven’s best gift, the use of their tongues, they said of us everything bad which they knew to be false, and which they wished to see realized.

Their forlorn hope was our “extravagance.”  “Never mind,” said one, “Christmas must come round, and then we shall see.”

When once the match of insinuation is applied to the train of rumoured difficulties, the suspicion that has been smouldering for awhile bounces at once into a report, and very shortly its echo is bounced in every parlour in a provincial town.

Long bills, that had been accustomed to wait for payment until Christmas, now lay on my table at midsummer; and tradesmen, who drove dennetts to cottages once every evening, sent short civil notes, regretting their utter inability to make up a sum of money by Saturday night, unless I favoured them, by the bearer, with the sum of ten pounds, “the amount of my little account.”

Dennett-driving drapers actually threatened to fail for the want of ten pounds!—­pastry-cooks, who took their families regularly “to summer at the sea,” assisted the counter-plot, and prematurely dunned my husband!