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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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561 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 the social circle between-whiles with recollections of divers splendid women who |
