tor by main force, and thrusting
him, all doubled up, into a chair, as if he had been a stuffed figure.
'What do you mean to do? What do you want to do? What is the matter with
you?'

While Nicholas raised up the collector, Smike had performed the same
office for Mr Snevellicci, who now regarded his late adversary in tipsy
amazement.

'Look here, sir,' replied Mr Lillyvick, pointing to his astonished
wife, 'here is purity and elegance combined, whose feelings have been
outraged--violated, sir!'

'Lor, what nonsense he talks!' exclaimed Mrs Lillyvick in answer to the
inquiring look of Nicholas. 'Nobody has said anything to me.'

'Said, Henrietta!' cried the collector. 'Didn't I see him--' Mr
Lillyvick couldn't bring himself to utter the word, but he counterfeited
the motion of the eye.

'Well!' cried Mrs Lillyvick. 'Do you suppose nobody is ever to look at
me? A pretty thing to be married indeed, if that was law!'

'You didn't mind it?' cried the collector.

'Mind it!' repeated Mrs Lillyvick contemptuously. 'You ought to go down
on your knees and beg everybody's pardon, that you ought.'

'Pardon, my dear?' said the dismayed collector.

'Yes, and mine first,' replied Mrs Lillyvick. 'Do you suppose I ain't
the best judge of what's proper and what's improper?'

'To be sure,' cried all the ladies. 'Do you suppose WE shouldn't be the
first to speak, if there was anything that ought to be taken notice of?'

'Do you suppose THEY don't know, sir?' said Miss Snevellicci's papa,
pulling up his collar, and muttering something about a punching of
heads, and being only withheld by considerations of age. With which Miss
Snevellicci's papa looked steadily and sternly at Mr Lillyvick for some
seconds, and then rising deliberately from his chair, kissed the ladies
all round, beginning with Mrs Lillyvick.

The unhappy collector looked piteously at his wife, as if to see whether
there was any one trait of Miss Petowker left in Mrs Lillyvick, and
finding too surely that there was not, begged pardon of all the company
with great humility, and sat down such a crest-fallen, dispirited,
disenchanted man, that despite all his selfishness and dotage, he was
quite an object of compassion.

Miss Snevellicci's papa being greatly exalted by this triumph, and
incontestable proof of his popularity with the fair sex, quickly grew
convivial, not to say uproarious; volunteering more than one song of
no inconsiderable length, and regaling t