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Updated: June 24, 2025
Stistick was standing on the rug before the fire, preparing for his first onslaught on Baron Brawl, when the servant announced Mr. Bertram. "Ah! Bertram, I'm delighted to see you," said Sir Henry; "doubly so, as dinner is ready. Judge, you know my friend Bertram, by name, at any rate?" and some sort of half-introduction was performed. "He who moved all Oxford from its propriety?" said the baron.
But, no; one name was the same to her as another. She had been told to go and call on Mrs. Stistick, and she had gone. She was told to receive Mr. Bertram, and she was quite ready to do so. Angels from heaven, or spirits from below, could Sir Henry have summoned such to his table, would have been received by her with equal equanimity.
Sir Henry explained that from some special cause he would be relieved from parliamentary attendance, at any rate till ten o'clock; that at the quiet dinner there would be no other guests except Mr. and Mrs. Stistick, and Baron Brawl, whose wife and family were not yet in town.
Only permit her so to sit, and there was no further labour in entertaining Mrs. Stistick. She was a large, heavy woman, with a square forehead and a square chin, and she had brought up seven children most successfully. Now, in these days of her husband's parliamentary prosperity, she was carried about to dinners; and in her way she enjoyed them.
"That no man knew better on which side his bread was buttered." "He is buttering the bread of millions upon millions," said Mr. Stistick. "Or doing better still," said Bertram; "enabling them to butter their own. Lord Boanerges is probably the only public man of this day who will be greater in a hundred years than he is now."
Bertram did go upstairs, that he might not appear to be unmanly, as he said to himself, in slinking out of the house. He did go upstairs, for one quarter of an hour. But the baron did not. For him, it may be presumed, his club had charms. Mr. Stistick, however, did do so; he had to hand Mrs. Stistick down from that elysium which she had so exquisitely graced.
"He is the first man of the age; don't you think so, Sir Henry?" "He was, certainly, when he was on the woolsack," said Sir Henry. "That is the normal position always assumed by the first man of his age in this country." "Though some of them when there do hide their lights under a bushel," said the judge. "He is the first law reformer that perhaps ever lived," said Mr. Stistick, enthusiastically.
"What do you say, Lady Harcourt," asked the baron, "as to the management of a school with how many millions of them, Mr. Stistick?" "Five hundred and fifty-five thousand male children " "Suppose we say boys," said the judge. "Boys?" asked Mr. Stistick, not quite understanding him, but rather disconcerted by the familiarity of the word.
And so Baron Brawl found, when on entering her drawing-room he told her that the fame of her charms had reached his ears, and that he was delighted to have an opportunity of making her acquaintance. Mr. and Mrs. Stistick were the next comers. Mrs. Stistick sat herself down on an opposite sofa, and seemed to think that she did her duty to society by sitting there. And so she did.
O, lady, has it ever been your lot to sit out such hour as that with some Mrs. Stistick, who would neither talk, nor read, nor sleep; in whose company you could neither talk, nor read, nor yet sleep? And if such has been your lot, have you not asked yourself why in this civilized country, in this civilized century, you should be doomed to such a senseless, sleepless purgatory?
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