d
altogether something that was beginning to grow offensive and odious.

'She knows well enough I like her,' so his liking said in confidence to
his vanity, and even _he_ hardly overheard them talk; 'better a great
deal than I knew it myself, till old Strafford got together this
confounded stupid dinner-party (he caught Miss Chattesworth glancing at
him with a peculiar look of enquiry). Why the plague did he ask _me_
here? it was Puddock's turn, and he likes venison and compots,
and--and--but 'tis like them--the women fall in love with the man who's
in love with himself, like Narcissus yonder--and they can't help it--not
they--and what care I?--hang it! I say, what is't to me?--and yet--if
she were to leave it--what a queer unmeaning place Chapelizod would be!'

'And what do you say to that, Captain Devereux?' cried the hearty voice
of old General Chattesworth, and, with a little shock, the captain
dropped from the clouds into his chair, and a clear view of the larded
fowl before him, and his own responsibilities and situation--

'Some turkey!' he said, awaking, and touching the carving-knife and
fork, with a smile and a bow; and he mingled once more in the business
and bustle of life.

And soon there came in the general talk and business one of those sudden
lulls which catch speakers unawares, and Mr. Beauchamp was found
saying--

'I saw her play on Thursday, and, upon my honour, the Bellamy is a
mockery, a skeleton and a spectacle.'

'That's no reason,' said Aunt Becky, who, as usual, had got up a
skirmish, and was firing away in the cause of Mossop and Smock-alley
play-house; 'why, she would be fraudulently arrested in her own chair,
on her way to the play-house, by the contrivance of the rogue Barry, and
that wicked mountebank, Woodward.'

'You're rather hard upon them, Madam,' said Mrs. Colonel Stafford, who
stood up for Crow-street, with a slight elevation of her chin.

'Very true, indeed, Mistress Chattesworth,' cried the dowager,
overlooking Madam Stafford's parenthesis, and tapping an applause with
her fan, and, at the same time, rewarding the champion of Smock-alley,
for she was one of the faction, with one of her large, painted smiles,
followed by a grave and somewhat supercilious glance at the gentleman of
the household; 'and I don't believe _they_, at least, can think her a
spectacle, and--a--the like, or they'd hardly have conspired to lock her
in a sponging-house, while she should have been in th