“General Belcher is simply disgusting, mother. I would never think of accepting a favor from him.”
“Not when his exertions can lift you and your mother out of poverty, Pandora? You talk most unreasonably.”
“I mean what I say,” said Pandora firmly.
“Very well, Miss, we shall see,” replied Mrs. M’Duffy, rising and sweeping majestically from the room.
Major Dunwoody called upon that very evening. He called again the next evening. He called frequently upon following evenings; and although Mrs. M’Duffy treated him with coldness which bordered upon disdain, the Major’s infatuation for Pandora was so strong that he forgot Mrs. M’Duffy’s incivility in rejoicing over the exceeding graciousness of her daughter.
The Major was convinced that Pandora loved him, but he hesitated to take practical measures to ascertain the fact, because he could not summon up a sufficient amount of resolution to tell her the truth about the loss of his leg. He was far too honorable to deceive her respecting his misfortune until she had committed herself to him, and he was haunted by apprehension that she might reject him when she knew the actual state of the case. A catastrophe brought matters to a crisis.
One Sunday evening the Major escorted Pandora to church. During the worship the Major felt his French leg give several very strange twitches, and he could hear a clicking sound in the knee as if some of the springs were loose and moving about in an independent manner. Pandora noticed the noise too, and leaned over to ask the Major, in a whisper, if there was not a mouse running about upon the floor of the pew. The Major said he did not think there was.
Pandora whispered that it sounded rather more like machinery.
The Major faintly intimated that it might proceed from the gas meter in the cellar, or perhaps the people in the gallery were fixing something about the organ.
The Major had always rather doubted the springs in the knee-joint of the French leg. They impressed him as being far more complicated and ingenious than was necessary for simple purposes of locomotion. He was thinking about them tremulously when the sermon began. The preacher had hardly announced his text when the Major’s leg suddenly flew up, kicked the bonnet upon the head of the lady in front of him over the wearer’s eyes, and finally the leg fell upon the top of the back of the pew, where it kicked away vigorously. The Major, blushing crimson, grasped it and pulled it down by a severe effort. The wearer of the bonnet looked at him with indignation. Pandora seemed ready to faint.