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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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634 ‘Mr Smike is from Yorkshire, Nicholas, my dear?’ said Mrs Nickleby, after dinner, and when she had been silent for some time. ‘Certainly, mother,’ replied Nicholas. ‘I see you have not forgotten his melancholy history.’ ‘O dear no,’ cried Mrs Nickleby. ‘Ah! melancholy, indeed. You don’t happen, Mr Smike, ever to have dined with the Grimbles of Grimble Hall, somewhere in the North Riding, do you?’ said the good lady, addressing herself to him. ‘A very proud man, Sir Thomas Grimble, with six grown-up and most lovely daughters, and the finest park in the county.’ ‘My dear mother,’ reasoned Nicholas, ‘do you suppose that the unfortunate outcast of a Yorkshire school was likely to receive many cards of invitation from the nobility and gentry in the neighbourhood?’ ‘Really, my dear, I don’t know why it should be so very extraordinary,’ said Mrs Nickleby. ‘I know that when I was at school, I always went at least twice every half-year to the Hawkinses at Taunton Vale, and they are much richer than the Grimbles, and connected with them in marriage; so you see it’s not so very unlikely, after all.’ Having put down Nicholas in this triumphant manner, Mrs Nickleby was suddenly seized with a forgetfulness of Smike’s real name, and an irresistible tendency to call him Mr Slammons; which circumstance she attributed to the remarkable similarity of the two names in point of sound both beginning with an S, and moreover being spelt with an M. But whatever doubt there might be on this point, there was none as to his being a most excellent listener; which circumstance had considerable influence in placing |
