“You don’t fill up,” she said more than once, and I found the same fault with her; and when that error had been removed, we could enter into one another’s feelings.
“The great thing you want is nourishment,” she said, when I had made a noble dinner; “people in the present age never attach sufficient importance to that point. They indulge too much in stimulants—no more, Kit, no more, or at the outside, only half fill your own, for you require it—while they scarcely allow themselves time to take the proper amount of substance. Through a very old and deeply respected friend of our family in the City, a man of the loftiest principles, I am enabled to get the real turtle at half-price; and it has been instrumental, under Providence, in the restoration of your health. I have sent him a telegram; and to-morrow, although it is the Sabbath-day, we shall find a tin here, when we return from church. It is better than Grove’s, or any that you see in the windows going down Cheapside. A turtle should never be allowed to sprawl about barbarously in the sun. It is against his nature, and it does him harm. He becomes demoralized, and looses firmness. They say that we all spring from turtles now; but I cannot believe it; for cannibalism is never nice, and turtle is. What a turtle your Uncle Cornelius would have made!”
“I am glad that you find him so nice,” I replied; “but he would always have tasted of tobacco.”
“Well, we must allow for one another; and there is no accounting for tastes. Jupiter likes turtle; but the other dogs won’t touch it. I had a dog once who would eat cigars. If he found a stump in the road, it was quite as good as a bone to him; but he did not live very long, poor fellow! Now let them take away the things; and when you have had your glass of port, come to me in the drawing-room. Don’t hurry, because I mean to have my nap.”
As yet, she had never mentioned Kitty’s name, which surprised me not a little; but I thought it likely that she was still rather sore at my behaviour. For when she had come to see us lately, it had been more than I could bear to listen calmly while everybody offered any sort of guess; just as they might discuss a case of abduction in the papers, or the theft of a female dog, who “answered to the name of Kitty.”
CHAPTER XLI.
TRUE COMFORT.
Every allowance should be made for a man who is in deep trouble. Not because it is his due, for that would count but little; but because he expects it, which he never does of his other debts, after experience. But he does hope to receive fine feeling, when he knows how cheap it is; and his sense of bad luck blackens in him, when he cannot even get that much.
And yet he ought to feel how trumpery are his trivial joys and sorrows, in the whirligig of this great world. He does his utmost thus to take it; to shudder at the wrongs of others, and to glow at their redress, to suck his fingers more and more with the relish of his neighbour’s pie; and perhaps with practice he begins to get some moonlight pleasure thus. But, alas! before he is perfect in it, some little turn of thought comes home, some soft remembrance thrills his heart, as the sun quivers in a well-spring, and all his nature lets him know that he belongs to it, and is itself.