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ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD 181
than medicine. You swallow them, madam. You say nothing, but
your looks are dreadful. You make wry faces : and when you have
taken them, you want a piece of sweetmeat to take the taste out
of your mouth."
The lady, thus wittily addressed, shrugs her lovely shoulders.
My wife exasperates me in many things: in getting up at insane
hours to go to early church, for instance ; in looking at me in a
particular way at dinner, when I am about to eat one of those
entrées which Dr. Goodenough declares disagree with me ; in nothing
more than in that obstinate silence, which she persists in maintaining
sometimes when I am abusing people, whom I do not like,
whom she does not like, and who abuse me. This reticence makes
me wild. What confidence can there be between a man and his
wife, if he can't say to her, " Confound So-and-so, I hate him ;" or,
" What a prig What-d'ye-call-'im is !" or, " What a bloated aristocrat
Thingamy has become, since he got his place ! " or what you will ?
" No," I continue, " I know why you hate the Twysdens, Mrs.
Pendennis, You hate them because they move in a world which
you can only occasionally visit. You envy them because they are
hand-in-glove with the great ; because they possess an easy grace,
and a frank and noble elegance with which common country-people
and apothecaries' sons are not endowed."
"My dear Arthur, I do think you are ashamed of being an
apothecary's son ; you talk about it so often," says the lady. Which
was all very well : but you see she was not answering my remarks
about the Twysdens.
" You are right, my dear," I say then. " I ought not to be
censorious, being myself no more virtuous than my neighbour."
"I know people abuse you, Arthur; but I think you are a
very good sort of man," says the lady, over her little tea-tray.
"And so are the Twysdens very good people—very nice, artless,
unselfish, simple, generous, well-bred people. Mrs. Twysden is all
heart : Twysden's conversational powers are remarkable and pleasing:
and Philip is eminently fortunate in getting one of those
charming girls for a wife."
" I've no patience with them," cries my wife, losing that quality
to my great satisfaction : for then I knew I had found the crack
in Madam Pendennis's armour of steel, and had smitten her in a
vulnerable little place.
" No patience with them ? Quiet ladylike young women !" I cry.
" Ah," sighs my wife, " what have they got to give Philip in
return for _________ "
" In return for his thirty thousand ? They will have ten thousand
pounds apiece when their mother dies."