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Chapter XXXII
Mrs Jarley's wrath on first learning that she had been threatened with
the indignity of Stocks and Penance, passed all description. The
genuine and only Jarley exposed to public scorn, jeered by children,
and flouted by beadles! The delight of the Nobility and Gentry shorn of
a bonnet which a Lady Mayoress might have sighed to wear, and
arrayed in a white sheet as a spectacle of mortification and humility!
And Miss Monflathers, the audacious creature who presumed, even in
the dimmest and remotest distance of her imagination, to conjure up
the degrading picture, 'I am a'most inclined,' said Mrs Jarley, bursting
with the fulness of her anger and the weakness of her means of
revenge, 'to turn atheist when I think of it!'
But instead of adopting this course of retaliation, Mrs Jarley, on
second thoughts, brought out the suspicious bottle, and ordering
glasses to be set forth upon her favourite drum, and sinking into a
chair behind it, called her satellites about her, and to them several
times recounted, word for word, the affronts she had received. This
done, she begged them in a kind of deep despair to drink; then
laughed, then cried, then took a little sip herself, then laughed and
cried again, and took a little more; and so, by degrees, the worthy lady
went on, increasing in smiles and decreasing in tears, until at last she
could not laugh enough at Miss Monflathers, who, from being an
object of dire vexation, became one of sheer ridicule and absurdity.
'For which of us is best off, I wonder,' quoth Mrs Jarley, 'she or me!
It's only talking, when all is said and done, and if she talks of me in
the stocks, why I can talk of her in the stocks, which is a good deal
funnier if we come to that. Lord, what does it matter, after all!'
Having arrived at this comfortable frame of mind (to which she had
been greatly assisted by certain short interjectional remarks of the
philosophical George), Mrs Jarley consoled Nell with many kind
words, and requested as a personal favour that whenever she thought
of Miss Monflathers, she would do nothing else but laugh at her, all
the days of her life.
So ended Mrs Jarley's wrath, which subsided long before the going
down of the sun. Nell's anxieties, however, were of a deeper kind, and
the checks they imposed upon her cheerfulness were not so easily
removed.
That evening, as she had dreaded, her grandfather stole away, and did
not come back until the night was far spent. Worn out as she was,
and fatigued in mind and body, she sat up alone, counting the
minutes, until he returned - penniless, broken-spirited, and wretched,
but still hotly bent upon his infatuation.
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