“Why don’t your stap-mother come down, Fancy?” said Geoffrey. “You’ll excuse her, Mister Dick, she’s a little queer sometimes.”
“O yes,—quite,” said Richard, as if he were in the habit of excusing people every day.
“She d’belong to that class of womankind that become second wives: a rum class rather.”
“Indeed,” said Dick, with sympathy for an indefinite something.
“Yes; and ’tis trying to a female, especially if you’ve been a first wife, as she hev.”
“Very trying it must be.”
“Yes: you see her first husband was a young man, who let her go too far; in fact, she used to kick up Bob’s-a-dying at the least thing in the world. And when I’d married her and found it out, I thought, thinks I, ‘’Tis too late now to begin to cure ’e;’ and so I let her bide. But she’s queer,—very queer, at times!”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yes: there; wives be such a provoking class o’ society, because though they be never right, they be never more than half wrong.”
Fancy seemed uneasy under the infliction of this household moralizing, which might tend to damage the airy-fairy nature that Dick, as maiden shrewdness told her, had accredited her with. Her dead silence impressed Geoffrey with the notion that something in his words did not agree with her educated ideas, and he changed the conversation.