now rather used up, and difficult to hold, that being the tone of the House of Commons.
“Pray don’t be at the trouble of composing yourselves to listen,” says Mortimer Lightwood, “because I shall have finished long before you have fallen into comfortable attitudes. It’s like—”
“It’s like,” impatiently interrupts Eugene, “the children’s narrative:
‘I’ll tell you a story Of Jack a Manory, And now my story’s begun; I’ll tell you another Of Jack and his brother, And now my story is done.’
—Get on, and get it over!”
Eugene says this with a sound of vexation in his voice, leaning back in his chair and looking balefully at Lady Tippins, who nods to him as her dear Bear, and playfully insinuates that she (a self-evident proposition) is Beauty, and he Beast.
“The reference,” proceeds Mortimer, “which I suppose to be made by my honourable and fair enslaver opposite, is to the following circumstance. Very lately, the young woman, Lizzie Hexam, daughter of the late Jesse Hexam, otherwise Gaffer, who will be remembered to have found the body of the man from somewhere, mysteriously received, she knew not from whom, an explicit retraction of the charges made against her father, by another waterside character of the name of Riderhood. Nobody believed them, because little Rogue Riderhood—I am tempted into the paraphrase by remembering the charming wolf who would have rendered society a great service if he had devoured Mr. Riderhood’s father and mother in their infancy—had previously played fast and loose with the said charges, and, in fact, abandoned them. However, the retraction I have mentioned found its way into Lizzie Hexam’s hands, with a general flavour on it of having been favoured by some anonymous