“Sophon_is_ba!”

I don’t burn lamps, because I can’t abide the smell of oil, and wax candles belonged to my day.  I hope the convenient situation of one of my tall old candlesticks on the table at my elbow will be my excuse for saying, that if he did that again, I would chop his toes with it. (I am sorry to add that when I told him so, I knew his toes to be tender.) But, really, at my time of life and at Jarber’s, it is too much of a good thing.  There is an orchestra still standing in the open air at the Wells, before which, in the presence of a throng of fine company, I have walked a minuet with Jarber.  But, there is a house still standing, in which I have worn a pinafore, and had a tooth drawn by fastening a thread to the tooth and the door-handle, and toddling away from the door.  And how should I look now, at my years, in a pinafore, or having a door for my dentist?

Besides, Jarber always was more or less an absurd man.  He was sweetly dressed, and beautifully perfumed, and many girls of my day would have given their ears for him; though I am bound to add that he never cared a fig for them, or their advances either, and that he was very constant to me.  For, he not only proposed to me before my love-happiness ended in sorrow, but afterwards too:  not once, nor yet twice:  nor will we say how many times.  However many they were, or however few they were, the last time he paid me that compliment was immediately after he had presented me with a digestive dinner-pill stuck on the point of a pin.  And I said on that occasion, laughing heartily, “Now, Jarber, if you don’t know that two people whose united ages would make about a hundred and fifty, have got to be old, I do; and I beg to swallow this nonsense in the form of this pill” (which I took on the spot), “and I request to, hear no more of it.”

After that, he conducted himself pretty well.  He was always a little squeezed man, was Jarber, in little sprigged waistcoats; and he had always little legs and a little smile, and a little voice, and little round-about ways.  As long as I can remember him he was always going little errands for people, and carrying little gossip.  At this present time when he called me “Sophonisba!” he had a little old-fashioned lodging in that new neighbourhood of mine.  I had not seen him for two or three years, but I had heard that he still went out with a little perspective-glass and stood on door-steps in Saint James’s Street, to see the nobility go to Court; and went in his little cloak and goloshes outside Willis’s rooms to see them go to Almack’s; and caught the frightfullest colds, and got himself trodden upon by coachmen and linkmen, until he went home to his landlady a mass of bruises, and had to be nursed for a month.

Jarber took off his little fur-collared cloak, and sat down opposite me, with his little cane and hat in his hand.

“Let us have no more Sophonisbaing, if you please, Jarber,” I said.  “Call me Sarah.  How do you do?  I hope you are pretty well.”