for her and regulated her household and her manners.
She drove over constantly from Roehampton and entertained
her friend with faint fashionable fiddle-faddle and
feeble Court slip-slop. Jos liked to hear it,
but the Major used to go off growling at the appearance
of this woman, with her twopenny gentility. He
went to sleep under Frederick Bullock’s bald
head, after dinner, at one of the banker’s best
parties (Fred was still anxious that the balance of
the Osborne property should be transferred from Stumpy
and Rowdy’s to them), and whilst Amelia, who
did not know Latin, or who wrote the last crack article
in the Edinburgh, and did not in the least deplore,
or otherwise, Mr. Peel’s late extraordinary
tergiversation on the fatal Catholic Relief Bill, sat
dumb amongst the ladies in the grand drawing-room,
looking out upon velvet lawns, trim gravel walks,
and glistening hot-houses.
“She seems good-natured but insipid,”
said Mrs. Rowdy; “that Major seems to be particularly
epris.”
“She wants ton sadly,” said Mrs. Hollyock.
“My dear creature, you never will be able to
form her.”
“She is dreadfully ignorant or indifferent,”
said Mrs. Glowry with a voice as if from the grave,
and a sad shake of the head and turban. “I
asked her if she thought that it was in 1836, according
to Mr. Jowls, or in 1839, according to Mr. Wapshot,
that the Pope was to fall: and she said—’Poor
Pope! I hope not—What has he done?’”
“She is my brother’s widow, my dear friends,”
Mrs. Frederick replied, “and as such I think
we’re all bound to give her every attention
and instruction on entering into the world. You
may fancy there can be no mercenary motives in
those whose disappointments are well known.”
“That poor dear Mrs. Bullock,” said Rowdy
to Hollyock, as they drove away together—“she
is always scheming and managing. She wants Mrs.
Osborne’s account to be taken from our house
to hers—and the way in which she coaxes
that boy and makes him sit by that blear-eyed little
Rosa is perfectly ridiculous.”
“I wish Glowry was choked with her Man of Sin
and her Battle of Armageddon,” cried the other,
and the carriage rolled away over Putney Bridge.
But this sort of society was too cruelly genteel for
Emmy, and all jumped for joy when a foreign tour was
proposed.
Am Rhein
The above everyday events had occurred, and a few
weeks had passed, when on one fine morning, Parliament
being over, the summer advanced, and all the good
company in London about to quit that city for their
annual tour in search of pleasure or health, the Batavier
steamboat left the Tower-stairs laden with a goodly
company of English fugitives. The quarter-deck
awnings were up, and the benches and gangways crowded
with scores of rosy children, bustling nursemaids;
ladies in the prettiest pink bonnets and summer dresses;
