nally voluble, a lively talker,
brimming with anecdote, but too sparkling, too prompt, too full of
personal relish of his point, threw my father's urbane supremacy into
marked relief; and so in another fashion did the Earl of Witlington, 'a
youth in the season of guffaws,' as Jorian DeWitt described him, whom
a jest would seize by the throat, shaking his sapling frame. Jorian
strolled up to us goutily. No efforts of my father's would induce him
to illustrate his fame for repartee, so it remained established. 'Very
pretty waxwork,' he said to me of our English beauties swimming by.
'Now, those women, young Richmond, if they were inflammable to the
fiftieth degree, that is, if they had the fiftieth part of a Frenchwoman
in them, would have canvassed society on the great man's account long
before this, and sent him to the top like a bubble. He wastes his time
on them. That fat woman he's bowing to is Viscountess Sedley, a porcine
empress, widow of three, with a soupcon of bigamy to flavour them.
She mounted from a grocer's shop, I am told. Constitution has done
everything for that woman. So it will everywhere--it beats the world!
Now he's on all-fours to Lady Rachel Stokes, our pure aristocracy;
she walks as if she were going through a doorway, and couldn't risk
an eyelid. I 'd like to see her tempting St. Anthony. That's little
Wreckham's wife: she's had as many adventures as Gil Blas before he
entered the Duke of Lerma's service.' He reviewed several ladies,
certainly not very witty when malignant, as I remembered my father to
have said of him. 'The style of your Englishwoman is to keep the nose
exactly at one elevation, to show you're born to it. They daren't run a
gamut, these women. These Englishwomen are a fiction! The model of them
is the nursery-miss, but they're like the names of true lovers cut on
the bark of a tree--awfully stiff and longitudinal with the advance
of time. We've our Lady Jezebels, my boy! They're in the pay of the
bishops, or the police, to make vice hideous. The rest do the same for
virtue, and get their pay for it somewhere, I don't doubt; perhaps from
the newspapers, to keep up the fiction. I tell you, these Englishwomen
have either no life at all in them, or they're nothing but animal life.
'Gad, how they dizen themselves! They've no other use for their fingers.
The wealth of this country's frightful!'

Jorian seemed annoyed that he could not excite me to defend my
countrywomen; but I had beg