Mrs Hominy shook her head with a melancholy smile that said, not inexpressively, ‘They corrupt even the language in that old country!’ and added then, as coming down a step or two to meet his low capacity, ‘Where was you rose?’
‘Oh!’ said Martin ‘I was born in Kent.’
‘And how do you like our country, sir?’ asked Mrs Hominy.
‘Very much indeed,’ said Martin, half asleep. ‘At least—that is—pretty well, ma’am.’
‘Most strangers—and partick’larly Britishers—are much surprised by what they see in the U-nited States,’ remarked Mrs Hominy.
‘They have excellent reason to be so, ma’am,’ said Martin. ‘I never was so much surprised in all my life.’
‘Our institutions make our people smart much, sir,’ Mrs Hominy remarked.
‘The most short-sighted man could see that at a glance, with his naked eye,’ said Martin.
Mrs Hominy was a philosopher and an authoress, and consequently had a pretty strong digestion; but this coarse, this indecorous phrase, was almost too much for her. For a gentleman sitting alone with a lady—although the door was open—to talk about a naked eye!
A long interval elapsed before even she—woman of masculine and towering intellect though she was—could call up fortitude enough to resume the conversation. But Mrs Hominy was a traveller. Mrs Hominy was a writer of reviews and analytical disquisitions. Mrs Hominy had had her letters from abroad, beginning ‘My ever dearest blank,’ and signed ‘The Mother of the Modern Gracchi’ (meaning the married Miss Hominy), regularly printed in a public journal, with all the indignation in capitals, and all the sarcasm in italics. Mrs Hominy had looked on foreign countries with the eye of a perfect republican hot from the model oven; and Mrs Hominy could talk (or write) about them by the hour together. So Mrs Hominy at last came down on Martin heavily, and as he was fast asleep, she had it all her own way, and bruised him to her heart’s content.