"The opiate—the opiate, Miss Emily? Who was its compounder? He must be a charmer indeed."
"Himself and his printer knows. Only some unhappy bard, who dubs us women 'The angels of life,' and misuses us vilely through a dozen cantos of halting verse. The poor man has forgot the story
'Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,'
or he would have christened us daughters of Eve by a very different name."
"O you little rogue! you are too hard upon this devotee to your dear deluding sex. It is only his excess of politeness that has made him forget his historical reading."
"His politeness! Fiddlestick! I would as soon have a troop of boys inflict the intolerable tediousness of their calf-love upon me as endure the rhapsodies of a booby, who strips us of our good flesh and blood, frailties and all, to etherealize us into an incomprehensible compound of tears, sighs, moonshine, music, love, flowers, and hysterics."
"Emily, how you run on!" broke in Mrs. Cheesham. "My dear Mr. Stukeley, really you must not encourage the girl in her nonsense. I declare, I sometimes think her tongue runs away with her wits."
"Better that, I'm sure, madam, than have it run away without them," responded Stukeley, in a deprecating tone, which threw Mrs. Cheesham, whose intellect was none of the acutest, completely out.
"Girls, there are Mr. Blowze and Mr. Lilylipz," said Mrs. Cheesham, looking in the direction of the friends, Adolph and Eugene; "you had better arrange with them about coming this evening."
Emily advanced, with her sister, to the engaging pair, who received them with that peculiar contortion of the body, between a jerk and a shuffle, which young men are in the habit of mistaking for a bow, and was soon deep in the heart of a flirtation with Adolph, while Fanny stood listening to the vapid nothings of Eugene, a very model of passive endurance. Frank Preston was anything but an easy spectator of this movement; nor was Emily blind to this; but, like a wilful woman, she could not forbear playing the petty tyrant, and exercising freely the power to torment which she saw that she possessed.