couldn’t resist. And,” expressing more feeling as if it were more feeling on the part of Fledgeby, “he is right, he is right!”
Still, no not even now, would they look at one another. Seeming to gnash his sparkling teeth, studs, eyes, and buttons, all at once, Mr. Lammle secretly bent a dark frown on the two, expressive of an intense desire to bring them together by knocking their heads together.
“Have you heard this opera of tonight, Fledgeby?” he asked, stopping very short, to prevent himself from running on into “confound you.”
“Why no, not exactly,” said Fledgeby. “In fact I don’t know a note of it.”
“Neither do you know it, Georgy?” said Mrs. Lammle. “N-no,” replied Georgiana, faintly, under the sympathetic coincidence.
“Why, then,” said Mrs. Lammle, charmed by the discovery which flowed from the premises, “you neither of you know it! How charming!”
Even the craven Fledgeby felt that the time was now come when he must strike a blow. He struck it by saying, partly to Mrs. Lammle and partly to the circumambient air, “I consider myself very fortunate in being reserved by—”
As he stopped dead, Mr. Lammle, making that gingerous bush of his whiskers to look out of, offered him the word “Destiny.”
“No, I wasn’t going to say that,” said Fledgeby. “I was going to say Fate. I consider it very fortunate that Fate has written in the book of—in the book which is its own property—that I should go to that opera for the first time under the memorable circumstances of going with Miss Podsnap.”
To which Georgiana replied, hooking her two little fingers in one another, and addressing the tablecloth, “Thank you, but I generally go