Nutts. My dear Mrs Nutts, talking about the human heart, is the pie made?
Mrs Nutts. Mr Nutts, just attend to your beards, and leave the pies to me.
Nutts. (Aside to Slowgoe, who points.) A woman of very strong mind. Go on, Mr Tickle. You left the gal with the caps and the riband.
Tickle. Well, Betsy Bermondsey has all sorts of sweethearts; and the Morning Post never troubles what head it has about the matter. Whether she marries the butcher, the baker, the milkman, or the policeman (as has a partic’lar weakness o’ the stomach for roast duck and inions), not one of the young Englanders in the Post, or any other paper, cares the vally of its own leaders.
Mrs Nutts. What’s leaders made of, Mr Tickle?
Tickle. Made o’ different things. Sometimes o’ steel-filings, sometimes o’ soap-and-water. But, as I say, Betsy Bermondsey has sweethearts; and the different parishes about her don’t send their churchwardens, some to speak for the butcher; some for the baker; some for the milkman; some for the police; and some for a cobbler that she’d never seen in all her days; and what’s worse, some from the cats’-meat man that she never looked at without shivering. No, Betsy gives away her heart, and is all the lighter and rosier for the gift. And she marries the baker, and in as quick a time as possible she’s in a little shop, with three precious babbies, selling penny rolls, and almost making ’em twopennies by the good nature she throws about ’em.
Nutts. What do you say to that, Mrs Nutts?
Mrs Nutts. Well, I should say Betsy were a happy woman. Every poor soul hasn’t her luck.
Tickle. You may say that. For only think of Isabella, Queen of Spain. Poor little merino lamb! With half-a-dozen ’bassadors prowling about her, and licking their lips, like tigers about a sheep-pen, to snatch her up—and at last it’s done. At last she’s laid hold of, and her very heart’s torn out of her, that she may be made a wife of a ——.
Nosebag. It makes a man’s blood bile to think of it.