I could not help feeling for a certain half of a sixpence that you have heard me speak of; and putting my hand mechanically upon my chest, I tore my fingers with the point of my new diamond-pin. Mr. Polonius had sent it home the night before, and I sported it for the first time at Roundhand’s to dinner.
“It’s a beautiful diamond,” said Mrs. Roundhand. “I have been looking at it all dinner-time. How rich you must be to wear such splendid things! and how can you remain in a vulgar office in the City—you who have such great acquaintances at the West End?”
The woman had somehow put me in such a passion that I bounced off the sofa, and made for the balcony without answering a word,—ay, and half broke my head against the sash, too, as I went out to the gents in the open air. “Gus,” says I, “I feel very unwell: I wish you’d come home with me.” And Gus did not desire anything better; for he had ogled the last girl out of the last church, and the night was beginning to fall.
“What! already?” said Mrs. Roundhand; “there is a lobster coming up,—a trifling refreshment; not what he’s accustomed to, but—”
I am sorry to say I nearly said, “D--- the lobster!” as Roundhand went and whispered to her that I was ill.
“Ay,” said Gus, looking very knowing. “Recollect, Mrs. R., that he was at the West End on Thursday, asked to dine, ma’am, with the tip-top nobs. Chaps don’t dine at the West End for nothing, do they, R.? If you play at bowls, you know—”
“You must look out for rubbers,” said Roundhand, as quick as thought.
“Not in my house of a Sunday,” said Mrs. R., looking very fierce and angry. “Not a card shall be touched here. Are we in a Protestant land, sir? in a Christian country?”
“My dear, you don’t understand. We were not talking of rubbers of whist.”
“There shall be no game at all in the house of a Sabbath eve,” said Mrs. Roundhand; and out she flounced from the room, without ever so much as wishing us good-night.