第66章

Straightway memory went back to the days when Letty was the loveliest of blooming young creatures: when to hear her sing was to make the heart jump into your throat;when to see her dance, was better than Montessu or Noblet (they were the Ballet Queens of those days); when Jack used to wear a locket of her hair, with a little gold chain round his neck, and, exhilarated with toddy, after a sederunt of the Cuttykilt mess, used to pull out this token, and kiss it, and howl about it, to the great amusement of the bottle-nosed old Major and the rest of the table.

'My father and hers couldn't put their horses together,'

Jack said.'The General wouldn't come down with more than six thousand.My governor said it shouldn't be done under eight.Lovelace told him to go and be hanged, and so we parted company.They said she was in a decline.

Gammon! She's forty, and as tough and as sour as this bit of lemon-peel.Don't put much into your punch, Snob my boy.No man CAN stand punch after wine.'

'And what are your pursuits, Jack?' says I.

'Sold out when the governor died.Mother lives at Bath.

Go down there once a year for a week.Dreadful slow.

Shilling whist.Four sisters --all unmarried except the youngest--awful work.Scotland in August.Italy in the winter.Cursed rheumatism.Come to London in March, and toddle about at the Club, old boy; and we won't go home till maw-aw-rning till daylight does appear.

'And here's the wreck of two lives!' mused the present Snobographer, after taking leave of Jack Spiggot.

'Pretty merry Letty Lovelace's rudder lost and she cast away, and handsome Jack Spiggot stranded on the shore like a drunken Trinculo.'

What was it that insulted Nature (to use no higher name), and perverted her kindly intentions towards them? What cursed frost was it that nipped the love that both were bearing, and condemned the girl to sour sterility, and the lad to selfish old-bachelorhood? It was the infernal Snob tyrant who governs us all, who says, 'Thou shalt not love without a lady's maid; thou shalt not marry without a carriage and horses; thou shalt have no wife in thy heart, and no children on thy knee, without a page in buttons and a French BONNE; thou shalt go to the devil unless thou hast a brougham; marry poor, and society shall forsake thee; thy kinsmen shall avoid thee as a criminal; thy aunts and uncles shall turn up their eyes and bemoan the sad, sad manner in which Tom or Harry has thrown himself away.' You, young woman, may sell yourself without shame, and marry old Croesus; you, young man, may lie away your heart and your life for a jointure.But if 'you are poor, woe be to you! Society, the brutal Snob autocrat, consigns you to solitary perdition.Wither, poor girl, in your garret; rot, poor bachelor, in your Club.

When I see those graceless recluses--those unnatural monks and nuns of the order of St.Beelzebub, (1) my hatred for Snobs, and their worship, and their idols, passes all continence.Let us hew down that man-eating Juggernaut, I say, that hideous Dagon; and I glow with the heroic courage of Tom Thumb, and join battle with the giant Snob.

(1) This, of course, is understood to apply only to those unmarried persons whom a mean and Snobbish fear about money has kept from fulfilling their natural destiny.

Many persons there are devoted to celibacy because they cannot help it.Of these a man would be a brute who spoke roughly.Indeed, after Miss O'Toole's conduct to the writer, he would be the last to condemn.But never mind, these are personal matters.