‘Upward and downward, thwarting and convolved,’
and puns and quips unceasing shot through their obscurity, like lightning through a cloud, seemed at first to be in no mood for the pathetic, or the serious. Pulito, too, after a brief and apparently regretful abstraction, broke forth in a strain half querulous, half laughing.
Pulito. “Well, ‘gentlemen commoners,’ however discourteous the remark may appear to you and your society, I must ne’ertheless regret that I am not this evening where I might have been, in a certain far-famed street, and gazing upon a certain lovely face, whose owner’s name ’twould be profanity to mention. I may say with the stricken Cowper,
‘Farewell to the elm-tree, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade.’”
Nescio, (smiling.) “‘Lugete oh! Veneres Cupidinesque!’ As an old dramatist has it,
‘Your soul, retired within her inmost chamber,
Like a fair mourner, sits in state with all
The silent pomp of sorrow round about her.’”
Pulito. “Yes, and to borrow from the same play, The Rival Ladies, I think,