General Ople delivered his card at Lady Camper’s lodgegates and escaped to his residence in a state of prickly heat that required the brushing of his hair with hard brushes for several minutes to comfort and re-establish him.
He had fallen to working in his garden, when Lady Camper’s card was brought to him an hour after the delivery of his own; a pleasing promptitude, showing signs of repentance, and suggesting to the General instantly some sharp sarcasms upon women, which he had come upon in quotations in the papers and the pulpit, his two main sources of information.
Instead of handing back the card to the maid, he stuck it in his hat and went on digging.
The first of a series of letters containing shameless realistic caricatures was handed to him the afternoon following. They came fast and thick. Not a day’s interval of grace was allowed. Niobe under the shafts of Diana was hardly less violently and mortally assailed. The deadliness of the attack lay in the ridicule of the daily habits of one of the most sensitive of men, as to his personal appearance, and the opinion of the world. He might have concealed the sketches, but he could not have concealed the bruises, and people were perpetually asking the unhappy General what he was saying, for he spoke to himself as if he were repeating something to them for the tenth time.
‘I say,’ said he, ‘I say that for a lady, really an educated lady, to sit, as she must—I was saying, she must have sat in an attic to have the right view of me. And there you see—this is what she has done. This is the last, this is the afternoon’s delivery. Her ladyship has me correctly as to costume, but I could not exhibit such a sketch to ladies.’
A back view of the General was displayed in his act of digging.
‘I say I could not allow ladies to see it,’ he informed the gentlemen, who were suffered to inspect it freely.
‘But you see, I have no means of escape; I am at her mercy from morning to night,’ the General said, with a quivering tongue, ‘unless I stay at home inside the house; and that is death to me, or unless I abandon the place, and my lease; and I shall—I say, I shall find nowhere in England for anything like the money or conveniences such a gent—a residence you would call fit for a gentleman. I call it a bi... it is, in short, a gem. But I shall have to go.’
Young Rolles offered to expostulate with his aunt Angela.
The General said, ‘Tha... I thank you very much. I would not have her ladyship suppose I am so susceptible. I hardly know,’ he confessed pitiably, ‘what it is right to say, and what not—what not. I-I-I never know when I am not looking a fool. I hurry from tree to tree to shun the light. I am seriously affected in my appetite. I say, I shall have to go.’