'Bah!' groaned Mrs. Sidebottom, 'most of these books are about people that cannot interest me; low-class creatures such as one encounters daily in the street, and stands aside from. I don't want them in the boudoir. Oh! here is one to my taste—a military novel, by a lady, about officers, parades, and accoutrements.'
So she read languidly, shut her eyes, woke, read a little more, and shut her eyes again.
'I hear the front-door bell,' she said. 'No one to see me, so I need not say, "Not at home."'
Presently she heard voices in the room beneath her—the room given up to Mrs. Cusworth—one voice, distinctly that of a man.
The circumstance did not interest her, and she read on. She began to take some pleasure in the story. She had come on an account of a mess, and the colonel, some captains and lieutenants were introduced. The messroom conversation was given in full, according to what a woman novelist supposes it to be. Infinitely comical to the male reader are such revelations. The female novelist has a system on which she constructs her dialogue. She takes the talk of young girls in their coteries, and proceeds to transpose their thin, insipid twaddle into what she believes to be virile, pungent English, which is much like attempting to convert milk and water into rum punch. To effect this, to the stock are added a few oaths, a pinch of profanity, a spice of indecency, and then woman is grated over the whole, till it smacks of nothing else.
Out of kindness to fair authoresses, we will give them the staple topics that in real life go to make up after-dinner talk, whether in the messroom, or at the bencher's table, or round the squire's mahogany. And they shall be given in the order in which they stand in the male mind:
1. Horses.
2. Dogs.
3. Game.
4. Guns.
5. Cricket.
6. Politics.
7. 'Shop.'
Where in all this is Woman? Echo answers Where? Conceivably, when every other topic fails, she may be introduced, just in the same way as when all game is done, even rabbits, a trap and clay pigeons are brought out to be knocked over; so, possibly, a fine girl may be introduced into the conversation, sprung out of a trap—but only as a last resource, as a clay pigeon.
The house-door opened once more, this time without the bell being sounded—opened by a latch-key—and immediately Mrs. Sidebottom heard Salome's step in the hall. Salome did not go directly upstairs to remove her bonnet and kiss baby, but entered her mother's room.
Thereat a silence fell on the voices below—a silence that lasted a full minute, and then was broken by the plaintive pipe of the widow lady. She must have a long story to tell, thought Mrs. Sidebottom, who now put down her book, because she had arrived at three pages of description of a bungalow on the spurs of the Himalayas. Then she heard a cry from below, a cry as of pain or terror; and again the male voice was audible, mingled with that of the widow, raised as in expostulation, protest, or entreaty. At times the voices were loud, and then suddenly drowned.