“That is the last of Mr. Lammle. Do you think it good?—Warn her father against me. I deserve it, for I have been in the scheme from the first. It is my husband’s scheme, your connection’s, and mine. I tell you this, only to show you the necessity of the poor little foolish affectionate creature’s being befriended and rescued. You will not repeat this to her father. You will spare me so far, and spare my husband. For, though this celebration of today is all a mockery, he is my husband, and we must live.—Do you think it like?”
Twemlow, in a stunned condition, feigns to compare the portrait in his hand with the original looking towards him from his Mephistophelean corner.
“Very well indeed!” are at length the words which Twemlow with great difficulty extracts from himself.
“I am glad you think so. On the whole, I myself consider it the best. The others are so dark. Now here, for instance, is another of Mr. Lammle—”
“But I don’t understand; I don’t see my way,” Twemlow stammers, as he falters over the book with his glass at his eye. “How warn her father, and not tell him? Tell him how much? Tell him how little? I—I—am getting lost.”
“Tell him I am a matchmaker; tell him I am an artful and designing woman; tell him you are sure his daughter is best out of my house and my company. Tell him any such things of me; they will all be true. You know what a puffed-up man he is, and how easily you can cause his vanity to take the alarm. Tell him as much as will give him the alarm and make him careful of her, and spare me the rest. Mr. Twemlow, I feel my sudden degradation in your eyes; familiar as I am with my degradation in my own eyes, I keenly feel the change that must have come upon me in yours, in these last few moments. But I trust to your good faith with me