“Short is the period of insulting power,
Offended Cupid finds his vengeful hour.”
Finding it impossible to regain his fair one’s favour, Mr. Bolingbroke
absented himself from her presence. He amused himself for some days
with his friend Mr. Granby, in attending to a plantation which he was
laying out in his grounds. Griselda was vexed to perceive that her
husband could find any amusement independent of her; and she never
failed, upon his return, to mark her displeasure.
One morning the gentlemen had been so much occupied with their
plantation, that they did not attend the breakfast-table precisely
in due time: the contrast in the looks of the two ladies when their
husbands entered the room was striking. Griselda was provoked with
Mrs. Granby for being so good-humoured.
“Lord bless me! Mrs. Granby, how you spoil these men,” cried she.
All the time the gentlemen were at breakfast, Mrs. Bolingbroke played
with her tea-spoon, and did not deign to utter a syllable; and
when the gentlemen left the breakfast-table, and returned to their
business, Griselda, who was, as our readers may have observed, one
of the fashionable lollers by profession, established herself upon a
couch, and began an attack upon Emma, for spoiling her husband in such
a sad manner. Emma defended herself in a playful way, by answering
that she could not venture to give unnecessary pain, because she was
not so sure as some of her friends might be of their power of giving
pleasure. Mrs. Bolingbroke proceeded to descant upon the difference
between friendship and love: with some vanity, and some malice, she
touched upon the difference between the _sorts of sentiments_ which
different women excited. Passion, she argued, could be kept alive
only by a certain happy mixture of caprice and grace, coldness and
ill-humour. She confessed that, for her part, she never could be
content with the friendship of a husband. Emma, without claiming or
disclaiming her pretensions to love, quoted the saying of a French
gentleman:
“L’Amitié est l’Amour sans ailes.”
“Friendship is Love deprived of his wings.”
Griselda had no apprehension that love could ever fly from her, and
she declared she could not endure him without his wings.
Our heroine did not imagine that any of the little vexations which
she habitually inflicted upon her husband could really diminish his
regard. She, never had calculated the prodigious effects which can
be produced by petty causes constantly acting. Indeed this is a
consideration, to which the pride or short-sightedness of human nature
is not prone.
Who in contemplating one of Raphael’s finest pictures, fresh from
the master’s hand, ever bestowed a thought upon the wretched little
worm which works its destruction? Who that beholds the gilded vessel
gliding in gallant trim--“youth at the prow, and pleasure at the
helm;” ever at that instant thought of--barnacles? The imagination is
disgusted by the anti-climax; and of all species of the bathos, the
sinking from visionary happiness to sober reality is that from which
human nature is most averse. The wings of the imagination, accustomed
to ascend, resist the downward flight.
Confident of her charms, heedless of danger, accustomed to think her
empire absolute and eternal; our heroine, to amuse herself, and to
display her power to Emma, persisted in her practice of tormenting.
The ingenuity with which she varied her tortures was certainly
admirable. After exhausting old ones, she invented new; and when
the new lost their efficacy, she recurred to the old. She had often
observed, that the blunt method of contradicting, which some bosom
friends practise in conversation, is of sovereign power to provoke;
and this consequently, though unpolite, she disdained not to imitate.
It had the greater effect, as it was in diametrical opposition to the
style of Mrs. Granby’s conversation; who, in discussions with her
husband, or her intimate friends, was peculiarly and habitually
attentive to politeness.