How different it is with the Newboys, now, where I have an
entrée--(having indeed had the honour in former days to give lessons to
both the ladies)--and where such a quack as Pinkney would never be
allowed to enter! A merrier house the whole quarter cannot furnish. It
is there you meet people of all ranks and degrees, not only from our
quarter but from the rest of the town. It is there that our great man,
the Right Honourable Lord Comandine, came up and spoke to me in so
encouraging a manner that I hope to be invited to one of his lordship’s
excellent dinners (of which I shall not fail to give a very flattering
description) before the season is over. It is there you find yourself
talking to statesmen, poets, and artists--not sham poets like Bulbul, or
quack artists like that Pinkney--but to the best members of all society.
It is there I made the sketch in the frontispiece while Miss
Chesterforth was singing a deep-toned tragic ballad, and her mother
scowling behind her. What a buzz and clack and chatter there was in the
room to be sure! When Miss Chesterforth sings everybody begins to talk.
Hicks and old Fogy were on Ireland; Bass was roaring into old Pump’s
ears (or into his horn rather) about the Navigation Laws; I was engaged
talking to the charming Mrs. Short; while Charley Bonham (a mere prig,
in whom I am surprised that the women can see anything) was pouring out
his fulsome rhapsodies in the ears of Diana White. Lovely, lovely Diana
White! were it not for three or four other engagements, I know a heart
that would suit you to a T.
Newboy’s I pronounce to be the jolliest house in the street. He has only
of late had a rush of prosperity, and turned Parliament man; for his
distant cousin, of the ancient house of Newboy of ----shire dying,
Fred--then making believe to practice at the bar, and living with the
utmost modesty in Gray’s Inn Road--found himself master of a fortune,
and a great house in the country, of which getting tired, as in the
course of nature he should, he came up to London, and took that fine
mansion in our Gardens. He represents Mumborough in Parliament, a seat
which has been time out of mind occupied by a Newboy.
Though he does not speak, being a great deal too rich, sensible, and
lazy, he somehow occupies himself with reading blue books, and indeed
talks a great deal too much good sense of late over his dinner-table,
where there is always a cover for the present writer.
He falls asleep pretty assiduously too after that meal--a practice which
I can well pardon in him--for, between ourselves, his wife, Maria
Newboy, and his sister, Clarissa, are the loveliest and kindest of their
sex, and I would rather hear their innocent prattle, and lively talk
about their neighbours, than the best wisdom from the wisest man that
ever wore a beard.
Like a wise and good man he leaves the question of his household
entirely to the woman. They like going to the play. They like going to
Greenwich. They like coming to a party at bachelor’s hall. They are up
to all sorts of fun, in a word; in which taste the good-natured Newboy
acquiesces, provided he is left to follow his own.
It was only on the 17th of the month that, having had the honour to dine
at the house, when, after dinner, which took place at eight, we left
Newboy to his blue books, and went up stairs and sang a little to the
guitar afterwards--it was only on the 17th December, the night of Lady
Sowerby’s party, that the following dialogue took place in the boudoir,
whither Newboy, blue books in hand, had ascended.
He was curled up with his House of Commons boots on his wife’s
arm-chair, reading his eternal blue books, when Mrs. N. entered from her
apartment, dressed for the evening.
[Illustration: THE STREET DOOR KEY.]
_Mrs. N._--Frederic, wont you come?
_Mr. N._--Where?
_Mrs. N._--To Lady Sowerby’s.
_Mr. N._--I’d rather go to the black hole in Calcutta. Besides, this
Sanitary Report is really the most interesting--[_he begins to read._]
_Mrs. N._ (_piqued_)--Well; Mr. Titmarsh will go with us.
_Mr. N._--Will he? I wish him joy!
At this puncture Miss Clarissa Newboy enters in a pink paletôt, trimmed
with swansdown--looking like an angel--and we exchange glances of--what
shall I say?--of sympathy on both parts, and consummate rapture on mine.
But this is by-play.
_Mrs. N._--Good night, Frederic. I think we shall be late.
_Mr. N._--You won’t wake me, I daresay; and you don’t expect a public
man to sit up.
_Mrs. N._--It’s not you, it’s the servants. Cocker sleeps very heavily.
The maids are best in bed, and are all ill with the influenza. I say,
Frederic dear, don’t you think you had better give me YOUR CHUBB KEY?
This astonishing proposal, which violates every recognised law of
society--this demand which alters all the existing state of things--this
fact of a woman asking for a door-key, struck me with a terror which I
cannot describe, and impressed me with the fact of the vast progress of
Our Street. The door-key! What would our grandmother, who dwelt in this
place when it was a rustic suburb, think of its condition now, when
husbands stay at home, and wives go abroad with the latch-key?
The evening at Lady Sowerby’s was the most delicious we have spent for
long, long days.
Thus it will be seen that everybody of any consideration in Our Street
takes a line. Mrs. Minimy (34) takes the homœopathic line, and has
_soirées_ of doctors of that faith. Lady Pocklington takes the
capitalist line; and those stupid and splendid dinners of hers are
devoured by loan-contractors, and railroad princes. Mrs. Trimmer (38)
comes out in the scientific line, and indulges us in rational evenings,
where history is the lightest subject admitted, and geology and the
sanitary condition of the metropolis form the general themes of
conversation. Mrs. Brumby plays finely on the bassoon, and has evenings
dedicated to Sebastian Bach, and enlivened with Handel. At Mrs.
Maskleyn’s they are mad for charades and theatricals.
They performed last Christmas in a French piece, by Alexandre Dumas, I
believe--“La Duchesse de Montefiasco,” of which I forget the plot, but
everybody was in love with everybody else’s wife, except the hero, Don
Alonzo, who was ardently attached to the Duchess, who turned out to be
his grandmother. The piece was translated by Lord Fiddle-faddle, Tom
Bulbul
[Illustration: A SCENE OF PASSION.]
being the Don Alonzo; and Mrs. Roland Calidore (who never misses an
opportunity of acting in a piece in which she can let down her hair) was
the Duchess.