It was not till later that I understood how this starveling poet, as well as the broken baronet, had both expressed their desire (under more favourable circumstances) to make love to me. Grand would have been my lot as Lady Lackington, but grander still as Mistress Stallabras, wife of the illustrious poet, who lived, like the sparrows, from hand to mouth.
CHAPTER VII.
HOW KITTY LEARNED TO KNOW THE DOCTOR.
Those evenings of riot from which Sir Miles was so often carried home speechless, were spent in no other place than that very room where I had seen the marriage of the sailors; and the president of the rabble rout was no other than the Doctor himself.
I learned this of Sir Miles. If my ladies knew it, of which I am not certain, they were content to shut their eyes to it, and to think of the thing as one of the faults which women, in contempt and pity, ascribe to the strange nature of man. I cannot, being now of ripe years, believe that Heaven hath created in man a special aptitude for debauchery, sin, and profligacy, while women have been designed for the illustration of virtues which are the opposite to them. So that, when I hear it said that it is the way of men, I am apt to think that way sinful.
It was Sir Miles himself who told me of it one morning. I found him leaning against the doorpost with a tankard of ale in his hand.
“Fie, Sir Miles!” I said. “Is it not shameful for a gentleman to be carried home at night, like a pig?”
“It is,” he replied. “Kitty, the morning is the time for repentance. I repent until I have cleared my brain with this draught of cool October.”
“It is as if a man should drag a napkin in the mud of the Fleet Ditch to clean it,” I said.
He drank off his tankard, and said he felt better.