Works of Charles Dickens - Charles Dickens [5390]
More prompting was necessary. Cupid must be brought up to the mark. The manager had put him down in the bill for the part, and he must play it.
'Sophronia, my dear,' said Mr Lammle, 'I don't like the colour of your dress.'
'I appeal,' said Mrs Lammle, 'to Mr Fledgeby.'
'And I,' said Mr Lammle, 'to Georgiana.'
'Georgy, my love,' remarked Mrs Lammle aside to her dear girl, 'I rely upon you not to go over to the opposition. Now, Mr Fledgeby.'
Fascination wished to know if the colour were not called rose-colour? Yes, said Mr Lammle; actually he knew everything; it was really rose-colour. Fascination took rose-colour to mean the colour of roses. (In this he was very warmly supported by Mr and Mrs Lammle.) Fascination had heard the term Queen of Flowers applied to the Rose. Similarly, it might be said that the dress was the Queen of Dresses. ('Very happy, Fledgeby!' from Mr Lammle.) Notwithstanding, Fascination's opinion was that we all had our eyes--or at least a large majority of us--and that--and--and his farther opinion was several ands, with nothing beyond them.
'Oh, Mr Fledgeby,' said Mrs Lammle, 'to desert me in that way! Oh, Mr Fledgeby, to abandon my poor dear injured rose and declare for blue!'
'Victory, victory!' cried Mr Lammle; 'your dress is condemned, my dear.'
'But what,' said Mrs Lammle, stealing her affectionate hand towards her dear girl's, 'what does Georgy say?'
'She says,' replied Mr Lammle, interpreting for her, 'that in her eyes you look well in any colour, Sophronia, and that if she had expected to be embarrassed by so pretty a compliment as she has received, she would have worn another colour herself. Though I tell her, in reply, that it would not have saved her, for whatever colour she had worn would have been Fledgeby's colour. But what does Fledgeby say?'
'He says,' replied Mrs Lammle, interpreting for him, and patting the back of her dear girl's hand, as if it were Fledgeby who was patting it, 'that it was no compliment, but a little natural act of homage that he couldn't resist. And,' expressing more feeling as if it were more feeling on the part of Fledgeby, 'he is right, he is right!'
Still, no not even now, would they look at one another. Seeming to gnash his sparkling teeth, studs, eyes, and buttons, all at once, Mr Lammle secretly bent a dark frown on the two, expressive of an intense desire to bring them together by knocking their heads together.
'Have you heard this opera of to-night, Fledgeby?' he asked, stopping very short, to prevent himself from running on into 'confound you.'
'Why no, not exactly,' said Fledgeby. 'In fact I don't know a note of it.'
'Neither do you know it, Georgy?' said Mrs Lammle. 'N-no,' replied Georgiana, faintly, under the sympathetic coincidence.
'Why, then,' said Mrs Lammle, charmed by the discovery which flowed from the premises, 'you neither of you know it! How charming!'
Even the craven Fledgeby felt that the time was now come when he must strike a blow. He struck it by saying, partly to Mrs Lammle and partly to the circumambient air, 'I consider myself very fortunate in being reserved by--'
As he stopped dead, Mr Lammle, making that gingerous bush of his whiskers to look out of, offered him the word 'Destiny.'
'No, I wasn't going to say that,' said Fledgeby. 'I was going to say Fate. I consider it very fortunate that Fate has written in the book of--in the book which is its own property--that I should go to that opera for the first time under the memorable circumstances of going with Miss Podsnap.'
To which Georgiana replied, hooking her two little