Alas! A Novel

If you will allow me, I shall have the pleasure of reading aloud to you some passages from 'Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings,' by Charles Dickens. I do not know much about the book myself, as I have never read it. I dare say that you know more about it than I do; but I am given to understand (with a glance at the page before him) that Mrs. Lirriper was a lodging-house-keeper, that she kept lodgings in London. She was a very good sort of woman, I believe (another hasty glance), but she sometimes had trouble with her servants. I am told that servants are troublesome sometimes (a slight nervous laugh, the more nervous because it does not seem to be followed by any echo from the audience). If you will allow me then, as I say, and if you think it will amuse you, I will read you a little of what she says about these troubles.
The foregoing remarks are uttered in a loud, shy, dogged voice by James Burgoyne to the Oxford Women's Provident Association. His voice is loud because, being quite unused to public reading, he does not know how to modulate it; it is shy from the same cause of unaccustomedness; it is dogged because he is very much displeased with his present occupation, and has not been successful in concealing that displeasure. When a man runs down to Oxford for a couple of nights, to see how the six years that have passed since he turned his undergraduate back upon the old place have treated her—runs down to a college chum unseen for the same six years—this is certainly not the way in which he expects to spend one of his two evenings.
I hope you will not mind, Jim —ominous phrase—the college friend has said; but I am afraid we shall have to turn out for half an hour after dinner. It is rather a nuisance, particularly as it is such a wet night; but the fact is, I have promised to read to the 'Oxford Women's Provident Association.' Ah, by-the-bye, that is new since you were here—we had no Provident Women in your day!
On the other hand, we had a great many improvident men, returns Jim dryly.