Dolly Dialogues

“There’s ingratitude for you!” Miss Dolly Foster exclaimed suddenly.

“Where!” I asked, rousing myself from meditation.

She pointed to a young man who had just passed where we sat. He was dressed very smartly, and was walking with a lady attired in the height of the fashion.

“I made that man,” said Dolly, “and now he cuts me dead before the whole of the Row! It’s atrocious. Why, but for me, do you suppose he’d be at this moment engaged to three thousand a year and—and the plainest girl in London?”

“Well, very plain anyhow. I was quite ready to bow to him. I almost did.”

“Oh, well, you didn’t then. It only looked like it.”

“I met him,” said Miss Dolly, “three years ago. At that time he was—oh, quite unpresentable. He was everything he shouldn’t be. He was a teetotaler, you know, and he didn’t smoke, and he was always going to concerts. Oh, and he wore his hair long, and his trousers short, and his hat on the back of his head. And his umbrella—”

“He carried that, Mr. Carter. Don’t be silly! Carried it unrolled, you know, and generally a paper parcel in the other hand; and he had spectacles too.”

“He has certainly changed, outwardly at least.

“Yes, I know; well, I did that. I took him in hand, and I just taught him, and now—!”

“Yes, I know that. But how did you teach him? Give him Saturday evening lectures, or what?”

“Oh, every-evening lectures, and most-morning walks. And I taught him to dance, and broke his wretched fiddle with my own hands!”