Fanny promised to give him good advice, and the old French schoolmaster took his leave, after declaring that if young Woodcock continued to be de boy of his school for the next quarter, he must be under the necessity to turn him out of it.
Luttrell called on me the following day, and was greatly amused with the engagement which I told him I had entered into with Julia. He informed me that Fred Lamb was arrived from the court of somewhere, I think Sicily, and had expressed a very strong desire to be allowed to visit me.
"Tell him," said I, "that I am worn out, and tired of the world, and good for nothing."
Luttrell, being our father-confessor general, to whom we all related everything, I asked him if he knew how Napier's tête-à-tête with Julia went off.
"Oh, I have just left the enemy," answered Luttrell, alluding to Amy, "who told me that Napier had made a violent attack on the virtue of Lord Carysfort's niece, in consequence of my flourishing panegyric, which had only served to prove her adamant to all but Sir Henry Mildmay."
"Apropos of that gay baronet," said I, opening my writing desk, "such virtue as you describe in this fair daughter of a maid of honour must not go unrewarded;" and I wrote a polite note to Mildmay, desiring him to call upon me in the evening.
Soon after Luttrell had taken his leave, old Smith the haberdasher was announced, with more returned bills.
"Angels defend us!" said I, "what am I to say to him this time?" I looked in the glass, settled my headdress as becomingly as possible, and trusted to my charms and soft speeches for subduing his anger as usual.
As I entered I caught a full view of my friend Smith in the glass; he was pacing the room with sturdy firmness, as though preparing himself for a desperate attack. His brow was knit, and, in his hand he held the fatal black pocket-book which I had no doubt contained my bills, six or seven times returned on his hands. "Avec tout mon savoir faire, je craignais de ratter le procureur," as Laura says in Gil Blas; I therefore returned to my bedroom unseen, and desired my faithful housekeeper, Mrs. Kennedy, to declare that her mistress had been seized with a fit on her way downstairs, and that, during the last attack of this sort, with which she had been afflicted, she had actually bitten her nurse's thumb clean off.