ed her head languidly towards
the Major, without otherwise moving, and asked him how his friend was.

'Dombey, Ma'am,' returned the Major, with a facetious gurgling in his
throat, 'is as well as a man in his condition can be. His condition is
a desperate one, Ma'am. He is touched, is Dombey! Touched!' cried the
Major. 'He is bayonetted through the body.'

Cleopatra cast a sharp look at the Major, that contrasted forcibly with
the affected drawl in which she presently said:

'Major Bagstock, although I know but little of the world,--nor can I
really regret my experience, for I fear it is a false place, full of
withering conventionalities: where Nature is but little regarded, and
where the music of the heart, and the gushing of the soul, and all that
sort of thing, which is so truly poetical, is seldom heard,--I cannot
misunderstand your meaning. There is an allusion to Edith--to my
extremely dear child,' said Mrs Skewton, tracing the outline of her
eyebrows with her forefinger, 'in your words, to which the tenderest of
chords vibrates excessively.'

'Bluntness, Ma'am,' returned the Major, 'has ever been the
characteristic of the Bagstock breed. You are right. Joe admits it.'

'And that allusion,' pursued Cleopatra, 'would involve one of the
most--if not positively the most--touching, and thrilling, and sacred
emotions of which our sadly-fallen nature is susceptible, I conceive.'

The Major laid his hand upon his lips, and wafted a kiss to Cleopatra,
as if to identify the emotion in question.

'I feel that I am weak. I feel that I am wanting in that energy, which
should sustain a Mama: not to say a parent: on such a subject,' said
Mrs Skewton, trimming her lips with the laced edge of her
pocket-handkerchief; 'but I can hardly approach a topic so excessively
momentous to my dearest Edith without a feeling of faintness.
Nevertheless, bad man, as you have boldly remarked upon it, and as it
has occasioned me great anguish:' Mrs Skewton touched her left side with
her fan: 'I will not shrink from my duty.'

The Major, under cover of the dimness, swelled, and swelled, and rolled
his purple face about, and winked his lobster eye, until he fell into a
fit of wheezing, which obliged him to rise and take a turn or two about
the room, before his fair friend could proceed.

'Mr Dombey,' said Mrs Skewton, when she at length resumed, 'was obliging
enough, now many weeks ago, to do us the honour of visiting us here;
in company,