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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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499 lantern who accidentally stumbled in her way--to the great terror of Mrs Nickleby, who, conjecturing more from Mr Pyke’s excitement than any previous acquaintance with the etymology of the word that smifligation and bloodshed must be in the main one and the same thing, was alarmed beyond expression, lest something should occur. Fortunately, however, Mr Pyke confined himself to mere verbal smifligation, and they reached their box with no more serious interruption by the way, than a desire on the part of the same pugnacious gentleman to ‘smash’ the assistant box-keeper for happening to mistake the number. Mrs Nickleby had scarcely been put away behind the curtain of the box in an armchair, when Sir Mulberry and Lord Verisopht arrived, arrayed from the crowns of their heads to the tips of their gloves, and from the tips of their gloves to the toes of their boots, in the most elegant and costly manner. Sir Mulberry was a little hoarser than on the previous day, and Lord Verisopht looked rather sleepy and queer; from which tokens, as well as from the circumstance of their both being to a trifling extent unsteady upon their legs, Mrs Nickleby justly concluded that they had taken dinner. ‘We have been--we have been--toasting your lovely daughter, Mrs Nickleby,’ whispered Sir Mulberry, sitting down behind her. ‘Oh, ho!’ thought that knowing lady; ‘wine in, truth out.--You are very kind, Sir Mulberry.’ ‘No, no upon my soul!’ replied Sir Mulberry Hawk. ‘It’s you that’s kind, upon my soul it is. It was so kind of you to come tonight.’ ‘So very kind of you to invite me, you mean, Sir Mulberry,’ replied Mrs Nickleby, tossing her head, and looking prodigiously |
