‘Look here, sir,’ replied Mr. Lillyvick, pointing to his astonished wife, ‘here is purity and elegance combined, whose feelings have been outraged—violated, sir!’
‘Lor, what nonsense he talks!’ exclaimed Mrs. Lillyvick in answer to the inquiring look of Nicholas. ‘Nobody has said anything to me.’
‘Said, Henrietta!’ cried the collector. ‘Didn’t I see him—’ Mr Lillyvick couldn’t bring himself to utter the word, but he counterfeited the motion of the eye.
‘Well!’ cried Mrs. Lillyvick. ‘Do you suppose nobody is ever to look at me? A pretty thing to be married indeed, if that was law!’
‘You didn’t mind it?’ cried the collector.
‘Mind it!’ repeated Mrs. Lillyvick contemptuously. ‘You ought to go down on your knees and beg everybody’s pardon, that you ought.’
‘Pardon, my dear?’ said the dismayed collector.
‘Yes, and mine first,’ replied Mrs. Lillyvick. ‘Do you suppose I ain’t the best judge of what’s proper and what’s improper?’
‘To be sure,’ cried all the ladies. ‘Do you suppose we shouldn’t be the first to speak, if there was anything that ought to be taken notice of?’
‘Do you suppose they don’t know, sir?’ said Miss Snevellicci’s papa, pulling up his collar, and muttering something about a punching of heads, and being only withheld by considerations of age. With which Miss Snevellicci’s papa looked steadily and sternly at Mr. Lillyvick for some seconds, and then rising deliberately from his chair, kissed the ladies all round, beginning with Mrs. Lillyvick.