"Then you'll not lose," was the answer; "for she did not tell me whom she preferred to the one she wishes to marry. They never do; and sometimes it is only discovered in Indiana. You and I surrender our respective guardianships on Christmas, Mr. BUMSTEAD; until when good-bye; and be early marriage their lot!"
"Be early Divorce their lot!" said BUMSTEAD, thrusting his book of organ-music so far under his coat-flap that it stuck out at the back like a curvature of the spine.
"I said marriage," cried Mr. DIBBLE, looking back.
"I said Divorce," retorted Mr. BUMSTEAD, thoughtfully eating a clove, "Don't one generally involve the other?"
[Footnote A: Oh, see here now, this is really too bad! The manner in which the great American Adapter is all the time making totally unexpected and vicious passes at the finest old cherished institutions of the age is simply frightful. PUNCHINELLO should prevent it?--Well, PUNCHINELLO did remonstrate at an early stage of the Adaptation; and the result was, that all the finest feelings of his nature were outraged by an ensuing Chapter, in which was introduced a pauper burial-ground swarming with deceased proprietors of American Punches!--EDS. PUNCHINELLO.]
[Footnote B: The whole idea is nothing less than atrocious; and, in our judgment, the Adapter's actual purpose in putting it forth is to make his own superlative goodness seem proved by a logical conclusion.--EDS. PUNCHINELLO.]
CHAPTER X.
OILING THE WHEELS.
No husband who has ever properly studied his mother-in-law can fail to be aware that woman's perception of heartless villainy and evidences of intoxication in man is often of that curiously fine order of vision which rather exceeds the best efforts of ordinary microscopes, and subjects the average human mind to considerable astonishment. The perfect ease with which she can detect murderous proclivities, Mormon instincts, and addiction to maddening liquors, in a daughter's husband--who, to the most searching inspection of everybody else, appears the watery, hen-pecked, and generally intimidated young man of his age--is one of those common illustrations of the infallible acuteness of feminine judgment which are doing more and more, every day, to establish the positive necessity of woman's superior insight, and natural dispassionate fairness of mind, for the future wisest exercise of the elective franchise and most just administration of the highest judicial office. It may be said that the mother-in-law is the highest development of the supernaturally perceptive and positive woman, since she usually has superior opportunities to study man in all the stages from marriage to madness; but with her whole sex, particularly after certain sour turns in life, inheres an alertness of observation as to the incredible viciousness of masculine character, which nothing less than a bit of flattery or a happily equivocal reflection upon some rival sister can either divert or mislead for a moment.
"Now don't you really think, OLDY," said Gospeler SIMPSON to his mother, as he sat watching her fabrication of an immense stocking for the poor, "that Hopeless Inebriate and Midnight Assassin are a rather too severe characterization of my pupil, Mr. MONTGOMERY PENDRAGON?"