“No such good luck; were I fatigued, I might hope to sleep. I will walk back with you. Leave me not alone in this room,—alone in the jaws of a fish; swallowed up by a creature whose blood is cold.”
“You have something still to say to me,” said Alban, when they were in the open air: “I detect it in your manner; what is it?”
“I know not. But you have told me no news; these streets are grown strange to me. Who live now in yonder houses? once the dwellers were my friends.”
“In that house,—oh, new people! I forget their names,—but rich; in a year or two, with luck, they may be exclusives, and forget my name. In the other house, Carr Vipont still.”
“Vipont; those dear Viponts! what of them all? Crawl they, sting they, bask they in the sun, or are they in anxious process of a change of skin?”
“Hush! my dear friend: no satire on your own connections; nothing so injudicious. I am a Vipont, too, and all for the family maxim, ‘Vipont with Vipont, and come what may!’”
“I stand rebuked. But I am no Vipont. I married, it is true, into their house, and they married, ages ago, into mine; but no drop in the blood of time-servers flows through the veins of the last childless Darrell. Pardon. I allow the merit of the Vipont race; no family more excites my respectful interest. What of their births, deaths, and marriages?”
COLONEL MORLEY.—“As to the births, Carr has just welcomed the birth of a grandson; the first-born of his eldest son (who married last year a daughter of the Duke of Halifax),—a promising young man, a Lord in the Admiralty. Carr has a second son in the Hussars; has just purchased his step: the other boys are still at school. He has three daughters too, fine girls, admirably brought up; indeed, now I think of it, the eldest, Honoria, might suit you, highly accomplished; well read; interests herself in politics; a great admirer of intellect; of a very serious turn of mind too.”
DARRELL.—“A female politician with a serious turn of mind,—a farthing rushlight in a London fog! Hasten on to subjects less gloomy. Whose funeral achievement is that yonder?”
COLONEL MORLEY.—“The late Lord Niton’s, father to Lady Montfort.”