‘Now,’ she pursued, ’let me tell you what excruciating trials I have to go through.  This man,’ she rocked the patient old gentleman to and fro, ’this man will be the death of me.  He is utterly devoid of a sense of propriety.  Again and again I say to him—­cannot the tailor cut down these trowsers of yours?  Yes, Mr. Amble, you preach patience to women, but this is too much for any woman’s endurance.  Now, do attempt to picture to yourself what an agony it must be to me:—­he will shave, and he will wear those enormously high trowsers that, when they are braced, reach up behind to the nape of his neck!  Only yesterday morning, as I was lying in bed, I could see him in his dressing-room.  I tell you:  he will shave, and he will choose the time for shaving early after he has braced these immensely high trowsers that make such a placard of him.  Oh, my goodness!  My dear Romer, I have said to him fifty times if I have said it once, my goodness me! why can you not get decent trowsers such as other men wear?  He has but one answer—­he has been accustomed to wear those trowsers, and he would not feel at home in another pair.  And what does he say if I continue to complain? and I cannot but continue to complain, for it is not only moral, it is physical torment to see the sight he makes of himself; he says:  “My dear, you should not have married an old man.”  What!  I say to him, must an old man wear antiquated trowsers?  No! nothing will turn him; those are his habits.  But, you have not heard the worst.  The sight of those hideous trowsers totally destroying all shape in the man, is horrible enough; but it is absolutely more than a woman can bear to see him—­for he will shave—­first cover his face with white soap with that ridiculous centre-piece to his trowsers reaching quite up to his poll, and then, you can fancy a woman’s rage and anguish! the figure lifts its nose by the extremist tip.  Oh! it’s degradation!  What respect can a woman have for her husband after that sight?  Imagine it!  And I have implored him to spare me.  It’s useless.  You sneer at our hbops and say that you are inconvenienced by them but you gentlemen are not degraded,—­Oh! unutterably!—­as I am every morning of my life by that cruel spectacle of a husband.’

I have but faintly sketched Mrs. Romer’s style.  Evelina, who is prudish and thinks her vulgar, refused to laugh, but it came upon me, as the picture of ‘your own old husband,’ with so irresistibly comic an effect that I was overcome by convulsions of laughter.  I do not defend myself.  It was as much a fit as any other attack.  I did all I could to arrest it.  At last, I ran indoors and upstairs to my bedroom and tried hard to become dispossessed.  I am sure I was an example of the sufferings of my sex.  It could hardly have been worse for Mrs. Romer than it was for me.  I was drowned in internal laughter long after I had got a grave face.  Early in the evening Mr. Pollingray left us.

CHAPTER III