“Not at all tired, John dear, but in the humour to write to Lizzie. Good night, dear Pa. Good night, you dear, good, gentle Pa!”
Left to herself she sat down to write, and wrote Lizzie a long letter. She had but completed it and read it over, when her husband came back. “You are just in time, sir,” said Bella; “I am going to give you your first curtain lecture. It shall be a parlour-curtain lecture. You shall take this chair of mine when I have folded my letter, and I will take the stool (though you ought to take it, I can tell you, sir, if it’s the stool of repentance), and you’ll soon find yourself taken to task soundly.”
Her letter folded, sealed, and directed, and her pen wiped, and her middle finger wiped, and her desk locked up and put away, and these transactions performed with an air of severe business sedateness, which the Complete British Housewife might have assumed,