“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.”