Or, at least, I don't know what day it is;
but I guess I'm starving.'
'You unhappy man!' she cried. 'Here, sit down and eat my
supper; and I'll just run upstairs and see my patient; not
but what I doubt she's fast asleep, for Maria is a MALADE
IMAGINAIRE.'
With this specimen of the French, not of Stratford-atte-Bowe,
but of a finishing establishment in Moray Place, she left
John alone in his father's sanctum. He fell at once upon the
food; and it is to be supposed that Flora had found her
patient wakeful, and been detained with some details of
nursing, for he had time to make a full end of all there was
to eat, and not only to empty the teapot, but to fill it
again from a kettle that was fitfully singing on his father's
fire. Then he sat torpid, and pleased, and bewildered; his
misfortunes were then half forgotten; his mind considering,
not without regret, this unsentimental return to his old
love.
He was thus engaged, when that bustling woman noiselessly re-
entered.
'Have you eaten?' said she. 'Then tell me all about it.'
It was a long and (as the reader knows) a pitiful story; but
Flora heard it with compressed lips. She was lost in none of
those questionings of human destiny that have, from time to
time, arrested the flight of my own pen; for women, such as
she, are no philosophers, and behold the concrete only. And
women, such as she, are very hard on the imperfect man.
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