Colney lured Mr. Pempton through a quagmire of the vices to declare, that it brutalized; and stammeringly to adopt the suggestion, that our breeding of English ladies—­those lights of the civilized world—­can hardly go with a feeding upon flesh of beasts.  Priscilla regretted that champagne should have to be pleaded in excuse of impertinences to her sex.  They were both combative, nibbed for epigram, edged to inflict wounds; and they were set to shudder openly at one another’s practises; they might have exposed to Colney which of the two maniacal sections of his English had the vaster conceit of superiority in purity; they were baring themselves, as it were with a garment flung-off at each retort.  He reproached them for undermineing their countrymen; whose Falstaff panics demanded blood of animals to restore them; and their periods of bragging, that they should brandify their wits to imagine themselves Vikings.

Nataly interposed.  She was vexed with him.  He let his eyelids drop:  but the occasion for showing the prickliness of the bristly social English, could not be resisted.  Dr. Peter Yatt was tricked to confess, that small annoyances were, in his experience, powerful on the human frame; and Dr. John Cormyn was very neatly brought round to assure him he was mistaken if he supposed the homoeopathic doctor who smoked was exercising a destructive influence on the efficacy of the infinitesimal doses he prescribed; Dr. Yatt chuckled a laugh at globules; Dr. Cormyn at patients treated as horses; while Mr. Catkin was brought to praise the smoke of tobacco as our sanctuary from the sex; and Mr. Peridon quietly denied, that the taking of it into his nostrils from the puffs of his friend caused him sad silences:  Nesta flew to protect the admirer of her beloved Louise.  Her subsiding young excitement of the day set her Boating on that moony melancholy in Mr. Peridon.

No one could understand the grounds for Colney’s more than usual waspishness.  He trotted out the fulgent and tonal Church of the Rev. Septimus; the skeleton of worship, so truly showing the spirit, in that of Dudley Sowerby’s family; maliciously admiring both; and he had a spar with Fenellan, ending in a snarl and a shout.  Victor said to him:  ’Yes, here, as much as you like, old Colney, but I tell you, you’ve staggered that poor woman Lady Blachington to-day, and her husband too; and I don’t know how many besides.  What the pleasure of it can be, I can’t guess.’

‘Nor I,’ said Fenellan, ’but I’ll own I feel envious; like the girl among a family of boys I knew, who were all of them starved in their infancy by a miserly father, that gave them barely a bit of Graves to eat and not a drop of Pempton to drink; and on the afternoon of his funeral, I found them in the drawing-room, four lank fellows, heels up, walking on their hands, from long practice; and the girl informed me, that her brothers were able so to send the little blood they had in their bodies to their brains, and always felt quite cheerful for it, happy, and empowered to deal with the problems of the universe; as they couldn’t on their legs; but she, poor thing, was forbidden to do the same!  And I’m like her.  I care for decorum too much to get the brain to act on Colney’s behaviour; but I see it enraptures him and may be comprehensible to the topsy-turvy.’