CHAPTER XXIX

    All school day’s friendship childhood innocence’
     We Hermia like two artificial gods
     Have with our needles created both one flower,
     Both on one sampler sitting on one cushion,
     Both warbling of one song both in one key
     As if our hands our sides, voices and minds
     Had been incorporate

          A Midsummer Night’s Dream

JULIA MANNERING TO MATILDA MARCHMONT

’How can you upbraid me, my dearest Matilda, with abatement in friendship or fluctuation in affection?  Is it possible for me to forget that you are the chosen of my heart, in whose faithful bosom I have deposited every feeling which your poor Julia dares to acknowledge to herself?  And you do me equal injustice in upbraiding me with exchanging your friendship for that of Lucy Bertram.  I assure you she has not the materials I must seek for in a bosom confidante.  She is a charming girl, to be sure, and I like her very much, and I confess our forenoon and evening engagements have left me less time for the exercise of my pen than our proposed regularity of correspondence demands.  But she is totally devoid of elegant accomplishments, excepting the knowledge of French and Italian, which she acquired from the most grotesque monster you ever beheld, whom my father has engaged as a kind of librarian, and whom he patronises, I believe, to show his defiance of the world’s opinion.  Colonel Mannering seems to have formed a determination that nothing shall be considered as ridiculous so long as it appertains to or is connected with him.  I remember in India he had picked up somewhere a little mongrel cur, with bandy legs, a long back, and huge flapping ears.  Of this uncouth creature he chose to make a favourite, in despite of all taste and opinion; and I remember one instance which he alleged, of what he called Brown’s petulance, was, that he had criticised severely the crooked legs and drooping ears of Bingo.  On my word, Matilda, I believe he nurses his high opinion of this most awkward of all pedants upon a similar principle.  He seats the creature at table, where he pronounces a grace that sounds like the scream of the man in the square that used to cry mackerel, flings his meat down his throat by shovelfuls, like a dustman loading his cart, and apparently without the most distant perception of what he is swallowing, then bleats forth another unnatural set of tones by way of returning thanks, stalks out of the room, and immerses himself among a parcel of huge worm-eaten folios that are as uncouth as himself!  I could endure the creature well enough had I anybody to laugh at him along with me; but Lucy Bertram, if I but verge on the border of a jest affecting this same Mr. Sampson (such is the horrid man’s horrid name), looks so piteous that it deprives me of all spirit to proceed, and my father knits his brow, flashes fire from his eye, bites his lip, and says something that is extremely rude and uncomfortable to my feelings.