Social Pictorial Satire | Page 6

breaks his heart, and he would fly to other climes! He revels in her infantile pouts and jealousies and heart-burnings and butterfly delights and lisping mischiefs; her mild, innocent flirtations with beautiful young swells, whose cares are equally light.
She is a darling, and he constantly calls her so to her face. Her favourite seaside nook becomes the mermaid's haunt; her back hair flies and dries in the wind, and disturbs the peace of the too susceptible Punch. She is a little amazon _pour rire_, and rides across country, and drives (even a hansom sometimes, with a pair of magnificent young whiskerandoes smoking their costly cigars inside); she is a toxophilite, and her arrow sticks, for it is barbed with innocent seduction, and her bull's-eye is the soft military heart. She wears a cricket-cap and breaks Aunt Sally's nose seven times; she puts her pretty little foot upon the croquet-ball--and croquet'd you are completely! With what glee she would have rinked and tennised if he had lived a little longer!
[Illustration: "IN THE BAY OF BISCANY O"
The Last Sweet Thing in Hats and Walking-Sticks.--_Punch_, September 27, 1862.]
She is light of heart, and perhaps a little of head! Her worst trouble is when the captain gives the wing of the fowl to some other darling who might be her twin-sister; her most terrible nightmare is when she dreams that great stupid Captain Sprawler upsets a dish of trifle over her new lace dress with the blue satin slip; but next morning she is herself again, and rides in the Row, and stops to speak with that great stupid Captain Sprawler, who is very nice to look at, whose back is very beautiful, and who sprawls most gracefully over the railings, and pays her those delightful, absurd compliments about her and her horse "being such a capital pair," while, as a foil to so much grace and splendour, a poor little snub-nosed, ill-dressed, ill-conditioned dwarf of a snob looks on, sucking the top of his cheap cane in abject admiration and hopeless envy! Then she pats and kisses the nice soft nose of Cornet Flinders's hunter, which is "deucedly aggravating for Cornet Flinders, you know"--but when that noble sportsman is frozen out and cannot hunt, she plays scratch-cradle with him in the boudoir of her father's country house, or pitches chocolate into his mouth from the oak landing; and she lets him fasten the skates on to her pretty feet. Happy cornet! And she plays billiards with her handsome cousin--a guardsman at least--and informs him that she is just eighteen to his love--and stands under the mistletoe and asks this enviable relation of hers to show her what the garroter's hug is like; and when he proceeds to do so she calls out in distress because his pointed waxed moustache has scratched her pretty cheek; and when Mr. Punch is there, at dinner, she and a sister darling pull crackers across his August white waistcoat, and scream in pretty terror at the explosion; to that worthy's excessive jubilation, for Mr. Punch is Leech himself, and nothing she does can ever be amiss in his eyes!
Sometimes, indeed, she is seriously transfixed herself, and bids Mr. Tongs, the hairdresser, cut off a long lock of her hair where it will not be missed---and she looks so lovely under the smart of Cupid's arrow that we are frantically jealous of the irresistible warrior for whom the jetty tress is destined. In short, she is innocence and liveliness and health incarnate--a human kitten.
When she marries the gilded youth with the ambrosial whiskers, their honeymooning is like playing at being married, their heartless billings and cooings are enchanting to see. She will have no troubles--Leech will take good care of that; her matrimonial tiffs will be of the slightest; hers will be a well-regulated household; the course of her conjugal love will run smooth in spite of her little indiscretions--for, like Bluebeard's wife, she can be curious at times, and coax and wheedle to know the mysteries of Freemasonry, and cry because Edwin will not reveal the secret of Mr. Percy, the horse-tamer; and how Edwin can resist such an appeal is more than we can understand! But soon they will have a large family, and live happy ever after, and by the time their eldest-born is thirteen years old, the darling of fourteen years back will be a regular materfamilias, stout, matronly, and rather severe; and Edwin will be fat, bald, and middle-aged, and bring home a bundle of asparagus and a nice new perambulator to celebrate the wedding-day!
And he loves her brothers and cousins, military or otherwise, just as dearly, and makes them equally beautiful to the eye, with those lovely drooping whiskers that used to fall and brush their bosoms, their smartly waistcoated bosoms, a quarter