Jilted! Or, My Uncle's Scheme, Volume 2

JILTED! OR, MY UNCLE’S SCHEME.
A Novel, in Three Vols.
VOL. II.
CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.
JILTED! OR, MY UNCLE’S SCHEME.

MY UNCLE’S SCHEME.
Creepmouse. “In love a young man should climb—not stoop. Yes, sir, to a young man like Tom, marriage should be a ladder, not a pit.” Retired from Business.
My uncle Dick amply vindicated his brother’s eulogium of his conversational powers. When, at the bank, I had beheld the stout, big form of my relative, and heard his bluff and highly familiar language, I believed him to be as nearly related to a boor as any man of his size and age can be. But my opinion of him underwent a very remarkable change when I listened to and watched him as he sat and talked at his brother’s dinner-table. His manner then was perfectly polite; positively there were certain points in his behaviour which my father might have beheld with envy and admiration. Added to this, he was exceedingly well read; talked French with a good accent, and quoted Latin with a happy applicability that robbed its employment of all flavour of pedantry.
I had nothing to say. I was eclipsed. His jokes kept us all in high spirits. His anecdotes (which I can appreciate better now than I could then) were uniformly excellent. He appeared to know everybody; spoke with a kind of dignified familiarity of noblemen of reputation, of famous actors, of celebrated authors. He had supped with Lamb and Elliston. He had been in Haydon’s studio when Scott had called; he had advised Southey on the purchase of some stocks; he had dined with Rogers, where he had met Sydney Smith, William Bankes, Luttrell, and many others, whose names I forget.
I am very much afraid, however, that we none of us listened to him with the interest he deserved. Speaking for myself, it would have given me more pleasure to have heard an account of a champion billiard-match or a boat-race, than the best of Talleyrand’s mots, or the smartest of Sydney Smith’s rejoinders. My aunt smiled occasionally, as much out of politeness as out of appreciation; and uncle Tom grew so soon tired of these stories—which I daresay he had often heard before—that he contrived to bring the conversation round to the Stock Exchange, the income tax, and the stamp duties, on which his brother talked as freely and sagaciously as if these matters had been his only studies all his life.