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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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30 intelligent middleaged mediocrity, as bad as a Ministerial statement in the House of Commons, with whom she was conversing in that intensely earnest manner which is the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once himself, that all really good people fall into, and from which none of them ever quite escape. “We are talking about poor Dartmoor, Lord Henry,” cried the Duchess, nodding pleasantly to him across the table. “Do you think he will really marry this fascinating young person?” “I believe she has made up her mind to propose to him, Duchess.” “How dreadful!” exclaimed Lady Agatha. “Really, some one should interfere.” “I am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an American drygoods store,” said Sir Thomas Burdon, looking supercilious. “My uncle has already suggested pork-packing, Sir Thomas.” “Dry-goods! What are American dry-goods?” asked the Duchess, raising her large hands in wonder, and accentuating the verb. “American novels,” answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some quail. The Duchess looked puzzled. “Don’t mind him, my dear,” whispered Lady Agatha. “He never means anything that he says.” “When America was discovered,” said the Radical member, and he began to give some wearisome facts. Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners. The Duchess sighed, and exercised her privilege of interruption. “I wish to goodness it never had been discovered at all!” she exclaimed. “Really, our girls have no chance nowadays. It is most unfair.” “Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered,” said Mr. Erskine; “I myself would say that it had merely been detected.” “Oh! but I have seen specimens of the inhabitants,” answered the Duchess, vaguely. “I must confess that most of them are extremely pretty. And they dress well, too. They get all their dresses in Paris. I wish I could afford to do the same.” “They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,” chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour’s cast- off clothes. “Really! And where do bad Americans go when they die?” inquired the Duchess. “They go to America,” murmured Lord Henry. Sir Thomas frowned. “I am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced against that great country,” he said to Lady Agatha. “I have travelled all over it, in cars provided by the directors, who, in such |
