IN WHICH THE GENTLEMEN FOLLOW THE LADIES.

Having had as much claret as they cared for, the gentlemen fluttered gaily into the drawing-room, and Puddock, who made up to Miss Gertrude, and had just started afresh, and in a rather more sentimental vein, was a good deal scandalised, and put out by the general’s reciting with jolly emphasis, and calling thereto his daughter’s special attention, his receipt for ‘surprising a weaver,’ which he embellished with two or three burlesque improvements of his own, which Puddock, amidst his blushes and confusion, allowed to pass without a protest.  Aunt Rebecca was the only person present who pointedly refused to laugh; and with a slight shudder and momentary elevation of her eyes, said, ’wicked and unnatural cruelty!’ at which sentiment Puddock used his pocket-handkerchief in rather an agitated manner.

‘’Tis a thing I’ve never done myself—­that is, I’ve never seen it done,’ said Little Puddock, suffused with blushes, as he pleaded his cause at the bar of humanity—­for those were the days of Howard, and the fair sex had taken up the philanthropist.  ’The—­the—­receipt—­’tis, you see, a thing I happened to meet—­and—­and just read it in the—­in a book—­and the—­I—­a——­’

Aunt Becky, with her shoulders raised in a shudder, and an agonised and peremptory ‘there, there, there,’ moved out of hearing in dignified disgust, to the general’s high entertainment, who enjoyed her assaults upon innocent Puddock, and indeed took her attacks upon himself, when executed with moderation, hilariously enough—­a misplaced good-humour which never failed to fire Aunt Becky’s just resentment.

Indeed, the general was so tickled with this joke that he kept it going for the rest of the evening, by sly allusions and mischievous puns.  As for instance, at supper, when Aunt Rebecca was deploring the miserable depression of the silk manufacture, and the distress of the poor Protestant artisans of the Liberty, the general, with a solemn wink at Puddock, and to that officer’s terror, came out with—­

’Yet, who knows, Lieutenant Puddock, but the weavers, poor fellows, may be surprised, you know, by a sudden order from the Court, as happened last year.’

But Aunt Rebecca only raised her eyebrows, and, with a slight toss of her head, looked sternly at a cold fowl on the other side.  But, from some cause or other—­perhaps it was Miss Gertrude’s rebellion in treating the outlawed Puddock with special civility that evening, Miss Becky’s asperity seemed to acquire edge and venom as time proceeded.  But Puddock rallied quickly.  He was on the whole very happy, and did not grudge Mervyn his share of the talk, though he heard him ask leave to send Miss Gertrude Chattesworth a portfolio of his drawings made in Venice, to look over, which she with a smile accepted—­and at supper, Puddock, at the general’s instigation, gave them a solo, which went off pretty well, and, as they stood about the fire after it, on a similar pressure, an imitation of Barry in Othello; and upon this, Miss Becky, who was a furious partisan of Smock-alley Theatre and Mossop against Barry, Woodward, and the Crow-street play-house, went off again.  Indeed, this was a feud which just then divided the ladies of all Dublin, and the greater part of the country, with uncommon acrimony.