l), notwithstanding these aids, the ladies of Brookfield
were crushed by Mrs. Chump. Her main offence was, that she revived for
them so much of themselves that they had buried. "Oh! the unutterably
sordid City life!" It hung about her like a smell of London smoke. As a
mere animal, they passed her by, and had almost come to a state of mind
to pass her off. It was the phantom, or rather the embodiment of their
First Circle, that they hated in the woman. She took heroes from the
journals read by servant-maids; she thought highly of the Court of
Aldermen; she went on public knees to the aristocracy; she was proud, in
fact, of all City appetites. What, though none saw the peculiar sting?
They felt it; and one virtue in possessing an 'ideal' is that, lodging
in you as it does, it insists upon the interior being furnished by your
personal satisfaction, and not by the blindness or stupidity of the
outer world. Thus, in one direction, an ideal precludes humbug.
The ladies might desire to cloak facts, but they had no pleasure
in deception. They had the feminine power of extinguishing things
disagreeable, so long as nature or the fates did them no violence. When
these forces sent an emissary to confound them, as was clearly the case
with Mrs. Chump, they fought. The dreadful creature insisted upon shows
of maudlin affection that could not be accorded to her, so that she
existed in a condition of preternatural sensitiveness. Among ladies
pretending to dignity of life, the horror of acrid complaints
alternating with public offers of love from a gross woman, may be
pictured in the mind's eye. The absence of Mr. Pole and Wilfrid, which
caused Mrs. Chump to chafe at the restraint imposed by the presence of
males to whom she might not speak endearingly, and deprived the ladies
of proper counsel, and what good may be at times in masculine authority,
led to one fierce battle, wherein the great shot was fired on both
sides. Mrs. Chump was requested to leave the house: she declined.
Interrogated as to whether she remained as an enemy, knowing herself
to be so looked upon, she said that she remained to save them from
the dangers they invited. Those dangers she named, observing that Mrs.
Lupin, their aunt, might know them, but was as liable to be sent to
sleep by a fellow with a bag of jokes as a watchdog to be quieted by
a bone. The allusion here was to Mrs. Lupin's painful, partially
inexcusable, incurable sense of humour, especially when a