“Then you don’t enjoy it now?”
“How is it possible?” said Miss Podsnap. “Oh it is such a dreadful thing! If I was wicked enough—and strong enough—to kill anybody, it should be my partner.”
This was such an entirely new view of the Terpsichorean art as socially practised, that Mrs. Lammle looked at her young friend in some astonishment. Her young friend sat nervously twiddling her fingers in a pinioned attitude, as if she were trying to hide her elbows. But this latter Utopian object (in short sleeves) always appeared to be the great inoffensive aim of her existence.
“It sounds horrid, don’t it?” said Miss Podsnap, with a penitential face.
Mrs. Lammle, not very well knowing what to answer, resolved herself into a look of smiling encouragement.
“But it is, and it always has been,” pursued Miss Podsnap, “such a trial to me! I so dread being awful. And it is so awful! No one knows what I suffered at Madame Sauteuse’s, where I learnt to dance and make presentation-curtseys, and other dreadful things—or at least where they tried to teach me. Ma can do it.”
“At any rate, my love,” said Mrs. Lammle, soothingly, “that’s over.”
“Yes, it’s over,” returned Miss Podsnap, “but there’s nothing gained by that. It’s worse here, than at Madame Sauteuse’s. Ma was there, and Ma’s here; but Pa wasn’t there, and company wasn’t there, and there were not real partners there. Oh there’s Ma speaking to the man at the piano! Oh there’s Ma going up to somebody! Oh I know she’s going to bring him to me! Oh please don’t, please don’t, please don’t! Oh keep away, keep away, keep away!” These pious ejaculations Miss Podsnap uttered with her eyes closed, and her head leaning back against the wall.