Frere, who during the above remark had drawn from his pocket a lump of crumbling sandstone, which, in order to examine more closely, he coolly deposited on a small satin-wood work-table, looked up in surprise as he rejoined, “Your opinions, touching the merits of womankind, seem to have suffered a recovery, young man, seeing that the last time I had the honour of discussing the matter with you, women were all perfidious hyaenas, or thereabouts. What has wrought so remarkable a transformation?”
Something appeared to have suddenly gone wrong with Lewis’s boot, for it was not until he had thoroughly investigated the matter that he replied, his face being still bent over the offending article, “The simple fact that as one grows older one grows wiser, I suppose. No doubt Gretchen behaved abominably, and rendered me for the time intensely wretched; but it was folly in me ever to have placed my happiness in the power of such a little, romantic, flirting, half-educated thing as she was; I should not do so now, and to argue from such an individual instance, to the disparagement of the whole sex, was one of the maddest notions that ever entered the brain of a hot-headed boy.”
“Phew!” whistled Frere in astonishment, “you are not over civil to your former self, I must say. If anybody else had spoken so disrespectfully of you you’d have been for punching his head for him; however, I believe your present frame of mind is the more sane of the two, though sweeping assertions are always more or less untenable. The truth is, you can lay down no general rule about it—women are human as well as men; there are a few very good, a few very bad, and an immense number who are nothing particular, in both sexes. There is no authority which would lead us to suppose Adam’s rib was made of ivory more than any of his other bones. There’s one vice belonging to the fair sex, though—they’re always an unmerciful time putting on their bonnets; your sister’s been five minutes already, and I’d lay a bet we don’t see her for five more.” As he uttered the last words, Rose, fully equipped and looking the picture of neatness, tripped into the room, to Frere’s intense discomfiture, who scrambled his relic of the Era of the Old Red Sandstone into his pocket with the air of some culprit schoolboy detected in his malpractices by the vigilant eye of his pedagogue.
CHAPTER XXXIV.—ROSE AND FRERE GO TO VISIT MR. NONPAREIL THE PUBLISHER.
Lewis, having slipped away for a moment to take leave of Mrs. Arundel, who dismissed him with a parting injunction to take care Ursa Major did not devour Rose, the trio descended the stairs, Frere taking an opportunity to whisper to Lewis, “She was down upon me then in every sense of the word; didn’t believe a woman could get ready in five minutes on any consideration; but your sister has more sense than I ever expected to see under a bonnet, that’s a fact.”
“Don’t you think for once you could dispense with that dreadful umbrella?” inquired Lewis, who had imbibed a few Leicesterian prejudices from his residence at Broadhurst.
“Dreadful umbrella! why what’s the matter with it?” exclaimed Frere, half unfurling his favourite; “it’s-water-tight, and has a famous strong stick to it; what more do you want in an umbrella, eh?”
“It might have been made of silk,” suggested Lewis mildly.