The evening at Lady Sowerby’s was the most delicious we have spent for long, long days.
Thus it will be seen that everybody of any consideration in Our Street takes a line. Mrs. Minimy (34) takes the homœopathic line, and has soirées of doctors of that faith. Lady Pocklington takes the capitalist line; and those stupid and splendid dinners of hers are devoured by loan-contractors, and railroad princes. Mrs. Trimmer (38) comes out in the scientific line, and indulges us in rational evenings, where history is the lightest subject admitted, and geology and the sanitary condition of the metropolis form the general themes of conversation. Mrs. Brumby plays finely on the bassoon, and has evenings dedicated to Sebastian Bach, and enlivened with Handel. At Mrs. Maskleyn’s they are mad for charades and theatricals.
They performed last Christmas in a French piece, by Alexandre Dumas, I believe—“La Duchesse de Montefiasco,” of which I forget the plot, but everybody was in love with everybody else’s wife, except the hero, Don Alonzo, who was ardently attached to the Duchess, who turned out to be his grandmother. The piece was translated by Lord Fiddle-faddle, Tom Bulbul
A SCENE OF PASSION.
being the Don Alonzo; and Mrs. Roland Calidore (who never misses an opportunity of acting in a piece in which she can let down her hair) was the Duchess.
Alonzo.
You know how well he loves you, and you wonder
To see Alonzo suffer, Cunegunda?—
Ask if the chamois suffer when they feel
Plunged in their panting sides the hunter’s steel?
Or when the soaring heron or eagle proud,
Pierced by my shaft, comes tumbling from the cloud,
Ask if the royal birds no anguish know,
The victims of Alonzo’s twanging bow?
Then ask him if he suffers—him who dies,
Pierced by the poisoned glance that glitters from your eyes!
[He staggers from the effect of the poison.
The Duchess.