Enter Mrs. B—— and her brother, who prosed me out of Spa, begged me from Lausanne, and hummed me into such a lethargy at Geneva that it is a mercy I was not buried alive! They are the best poor dears on earth—and there’s the worst of it.
I had my cheek kissed by the sister, and my hand by the brother, for ten minutes at least, by the town clock—not rapid electrics, but long-drawn kisses,
LETTERS AND GOSSIP. | 125 |
The kissing over, the prosing began.
Mrs. B—— took the lead, comme de raison, opened the campaign d’ennui, with unwonted vigour; the fun was to see her brother deliberately taking up his posture of patience, like a general on active service, his heavy lids gently falling over his heavy eyes, his very nostrils breathing stupefaction.
Observe, for it is good to know the outer and visible signs of our natural enemies, Bores have noses peculiar to themselves. The nose of a German Bore is a sort of long, broad, romantic, rather aquiline, and rather drooping nose—the drooping nose characterises invariably the nosology of a bore—in a word, it is the leading feature.
But to return; Mrs. B—— began with an account of her journey. Not a stage, not a turn in the road, not a cross that I had gone over six days before but was described to me, first en gros and then en détail; but this was nothing—at least it was fact, topographical fact—but to my utter despair, every village, town, and house, “put her in mind” of some cottage, town, road, street, or something, in Ireland, Scotland, or England—something had happened to her in one or all of the aforesaid places. But still this was nothing; they were graphic pictures, however ill-drawn—it was the moral demonstrations, the particular parentheses, which left me without hope, help, or resource; every beggar, post, landlord, or landlady, “put her in mind” of her mother’s housemaid, who used to say when
126 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
The dear B——’s have drunk like sparrows and swelled like crows, but drunk a little of everything, “from humble port to imperial tokay,” and it is this that renders them more tiresome in their prosy scraps than the most obdurate ignorance could ever make itself. No one could be in the room a moment after Mr. B—— came in, without knowing that he was a geologist, botanist, archæologist,—everything. He began by complaining of all he had suffered from heat, and I gave him my whole share of sympathy! But when he got upon the causes, and talked of the fundamental laws of nature, I started up in the midst of a diatribe on cosmogony, and in despair, exclaimed, “My dear Mr. B——, you are aware that God made the world in six days, and did not say one word about cosmogony!” It might be thought that was a hard hit;—not at all, he took it gravely and began a disquisition on the Mosaic account. The word Moses over-
LETTERS AND GOSSIP. | 127 |