I call all the powers of time and chance, which severally check us in our careers in this world, to bear me witness, that I could never yet get fairly to my uncle Toby’s amours, till this very moment, that my mother’s curiosity , as she stated the affair,⸺or a different impulse in her, as my father would have it⸺wished her to take a peep at them through the keyhole.
“Call it, my dear, by its right name, quoth my father, and look through the keyhole as long as you will.”
Nothing but the fermentation of that little subacid humour, which I have often spoken of, in my father’s habit, could have vented such an insinuation⸺he was however frank and generous in his nature, and at all times open to conviction; so that he had scarce got to the last word of this ungracious retort, when his conscience smote him.
My mother was then conjugally swinging with her left arm twisted under his right, in such wise, that the inside of her hand rested upon the back of his—she raised her fingers, and let them fall—it could scarce be call’d a tap; or if it was a tap⸺’twould have puzzled a casuist to say, whether ’twas a tap of remonstrance, or a tap of confession: my father, who was all sensibilities from head to foot, class’d it right—Conscience redoubled her blow—he turn’d his face suddenly the other way, and my mother supposing his body was about to turn with it in order to move homewards, by a cross movement of her right leg, keeping her left as its centre, brought herself so far in front, that as he turned his head, he met her eye⸻Confusion again! he saw a thousand reasons to wipe out the reproach, and as many to reproach himself⸺a thin, blue, chill, pellucid crystal with all its humours so at rest, the least mote or speck of desire might have been seen, at the bottom of it, had it existed⸺it did