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ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD S77
will; therefore, as we pass over the raptures and joys of the
courting so very curtly, you must please to gratify me by taking
the grief in a very short measure. If our young people are going
to suffer, let the pain be soon over. " Sit down in that chair, Miss
Baynes, if you please, and you, Mr. Firmin, in this. Allow me to
examine you ; just open your mouth, if you please ; and—oh, oh,
my dear miss—there it is out ! A little eau-de-Cologne and water,
my dear. And now, Mr. Firmin, if you please, we will—what
fangs ! what a big one ! Two guineas. Thank you. Goodmorning.
Come to me once a year. John, show in the next
party." About the ensuing painful business, then, I protest I
don't intend to be much longer occupied than the humane and
dexterous operator to whom I have made so bold as to liken myself.
If my pretty Charlotte is to have a tooth out, it shall be removed
as gently as possible, poor dear ! As for Philip, and his great redbearded
jaw, I don't care so much if the tug makes him roar a
little. And yet they remain, they remain and throb in after life,
those wounds of early days. Have I not said how, as I chanced
to walk with Mr. Firmin in Paris, many years after the domestic
circumstances here recorded, he paused before the window of that
house near the Champs Elysées where Madame Smolensk once
held her pension, shook his fist at a jalousie of the now dingy and
dilapidated mansion, and intimated to me that he had undergone
severe sufferings in the chamber lighted by yonder window ? So
have we all suffered; so, very likely, my dear young miss or
master who peruses this modest page, will you have to suffer in
your time. You will not die of the operation, most probably : but
it is painful : it makes a gap in the mouth, voyez-vous ? and years
and years, maybe, after, as you think of it, the smart is renewed,
and the dismal tragedy enacts itself over again.
Philip liked his little maiden to go out, to dance, to laugh, to be
admired, to be happy. In her artless way she told him of her balls,
her tea-parties, her pleasures, her partners. In a girl's first little
season nothing escapes her. Have you not wondered to hear them
tell about the events of the evening, about the dresses of the
dowagers, about the compliments of the young men, about the
behaviour of the girls, and what not ?
Little Charlotte used to enact the over-night's comedy for Philip,
pouring out her young heart in her prattle as her little feet skipped
by his side. And to hear Philip roar with laughter ! It would
have done you good. You might have heard him from the Obelisk
to the Etoile. People turned round to look at him, and shrugged
their shoulders wonderingly, as good-natured French folks will do.
How could a man who had been lately ruined, a man who had just