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Lady Camper's brows showed a trifling bewilderment. 'I am speaking of these young people, General Ople. 'I consent to everything beforehand, my dear lady. He should be, I say Mr. Rolles should be provided for. 'So should she, General, so should Elizabeth. 'She shall be, she will, dear madam. What I have, with your permission, if good heaven! Lady Camper, I scarcely know where I am.
I bring no invalid frame to a union that necessitates the leaving of the front door open day and night to the doctor. My belief is, I could follow my husband still on a campaign, if he were a warrior instead of a pensioner. General Ople winced. He was about to say humbly, 'As General of Brigade...
And as a crutch, General Ople, parading her grounds with the aged woman, found himself used and treated. The accuracy of his perceptions might be questioned.
Sketches in watercolours of the scenes she had visited adorned her walls, and a pair of pistols, that she had found useful, she affirmed, lay on the writing-desk in her drawing-room. General Ople gathered from the rector that she had a great contempt for men: yet it was curiously varied with lamentations over the weakness of women.
'Yes, yes; I say they chirp early in the morning, said General Ople. 'At all hours. 'The song of birds...? he pleaded softly for nature. 'If the nest is provided for them; but I don't like vagabond chirping. The General perfectly acquiesced.
'Something worthier than that, said Lady Camper, pencilling outlines rapidly on the margin of a book, and he saw himself lashing a pony; 'or that, and he was plucking at a cabbage; 'or that, and he was bowing to three petticoated posts. 'The likeness is exact, General Ople groaned. 'So you may suppose I have studied you, said she. 'But there is no real likeness.
'How, my good General Ople! how is it marked in any degree? cried Lady Camper. 'I am not generous. I don't pretend to be; and certainly I don't want the young people to think me so. I want to be just. I have assumed that you intend to be the same. Then will you do me the favour to reply to me?
Their speech concerning Lady Camper was an exchange of commonplaces over her loneliness: and this condition of hers was the more perplexing to General Ople on his hearing from his daughter that the lady was very fine-looking, and not so very old, as he had fancied eccentric ladies must be. The rector's account of her, too, excited the mind.
He began to feel a sort of nibbling pleasure in her grotesque sketches of his person; a tendency to recur to the old ones while dreading the arrival of new. You hear old gentlemen speak fondly of the swish; and they are not attached to pain, but the instrument revives their feeling of youth; and General Ople half enjoyed, while shrinking, Lady Camper's foregone outlines of him.
Now, this, and not the series representing the martyrdom of the old couple at Douro Lodge Gates, whose rigid frames bore witness to the close packing of a gentlemanly residence, this was the sketch General Ople, in his madness from the pursuing bite of the gadfly, handed about at Mrs. Pollington's lawn-party.
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