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By the time the nutcrackers were busy, the more riotous subalterns had reached that state of merriness, in which they found every distant pop of a cork the excuse for a fresh cheer and cries of "Take cover!" Major Hardy, too, was beaming. He had sipped the best part of three bottles of champagne, and was feeling himself, multiplied by three.
A doleful wail betrayed her hiding place, and she now emerged with a pair of nutcrackers, ditto of pinched fingers, and an expression of great mental and bodily distress. Her woes vanished instantaneously, however, when the feast was announced, and she performed an unsteady pas seul about the banquet, varied by skirmishes with her long night-gown and darts at any unguarded viand that tempted her.
At the desert Emmy was gone out to superintend further domestic arrangements; Jos was in his great chair dozing over Galignani; Georgy and the new arrival sat close to each other he had continued to look at her knowingly more than once, and at last he laid down the nutcrackers. "I say," said Georgy. "What do you say?" Becky said, laughing. "You're the lady I saw in the mask at the Rouge et Noir."
In the sitting-room La Cibot explained her position with regard to the pair of nutcrackers at very considerable length. She repeated the history of her loan with added embellishments, and gave a full account of the immense services rendered during the past ten years to MM. Pons and Schmucke. The two old men, to all appearance, could not exist without her motherly care.
About a month after the perfidious Werther's withdrawal, poor Pons left his bed for the first time after an attack of nervous fever, and walked along the sunny side of the street leaning on Schmucke's arm. Nobody in the Boulevard du Temple laughed at the "pair of nutcrackers," for one of the old men looked so shattered, and the other so touchingly careful of his invalid friend.
They all talked at once, loudly interrupting one another, and Auntie tapped on the table with the nutcrackers and said, flushed and angry: "We won't have a merchant; we won't have one! If you choose a merchant I shall go to an almshouse."
"Don't be angry, don't be angry, you old Satan!" said Basavriuk, employing such words as would have made a good man stop his ears. Behold, instead of a cat, an old woman all bent into a bow, with a face wrinkled like a baked apple, and a nose and chin like a pair of nutcrackers. "A fine charmer!" thought Peter; and cold chills ran down his back.
Cibot, portress of the house in the Rue de Normandie, was the pivot on which the domestic life of the nutcrackers turned; but Mme. Cibot plays so large a part in the drama which grew out of their double existence, that it will be more appropriate to give her portrait on her first appearance in this Scene of Parisian Life.
They did not both come together, surely." "Now, lookee, Fullerton," said my old friend, tapping the mahogany with the nutcrackers, as though he was about to say something remarkably clever; "one of 'em, Jemmy, had a kind of a cast in one of his eyes didn't he, Judge?" "Yes," said I; "but their names were not spelt alike." "No, no!" cried the squire; "I'm coming to that.
Instead of assisting in the cares of a family, picking up nuts and learning other lessons proper to a young squirrel, he seemed to settle himself from his earliest years into a sort of lofty contempt for the Nutcrackers, for Nutcracker Lodge, and for all the good old ways and institutions of the domestic hole, which he declared to be stupid and unreasonable, and entirely behind the times.
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