“A Really Nice Story”

I LIKE FANNY for a dozen quite solid reasons, but also because she is the living image of my Dresden Shepherdess. Of course, she pretends to object to being told so; but no woman can really object to the statement that her complexion is like the finest porcelain, and I notice that Fanny in her dress cultivates the style with great perseverance.

At costume balls she usually gets herself up in direct imitation of the figure upon my mantelpiece, dignifying herself, however, with the name of Madame de Pompadour; like many quite spotless women, she has rather a passion for those members of her sex whose fame is not precisely due to their respectability. Similarly a man whose morals are irreproachable lends a piquancy to his conversation by hinting that he is a perfect devil with the ladies; in both cases the real sinner takes good care to broaden his phylacteries, and to invite a High Church parson whenever he gives a dinner party. If your character is as white as snow you may tell the world that you’re no better than you should be; but if there is a single speck of mud on it, for heaven’s sake keep silent, and walk on the other side with the priest and the Levite when your friend gets into the Divorce Court.

Now, Fanny and I adore muffins, and in the winter months she often invites me to come and eat one with her.

“Wretch!” she said, when I appeared one afternoon to keep such an appointment. “I asked you for two days ago.”

I pulled out my watch. “I am a little late,” I said apologetically; “but you have told me so often that you loathe punctual people.”

“I loathe the man who comes to dinner at the precise hour for which you’ve asked him; and then you have to hurl yourself into your clothes, you can’t find anything, and you get frightfully hot, and when, finally, you’ve leaped at one bound down a flight of stairs, you come into the room perfectly breathless; and as red as a turkey cock.”

“Somewhat bruised as well, I should imagine.”

Fanny got so excited about the man who came to dinner as if he’d lived all his life in savage places, that she quite forgot my particular transgression. The muffin to which I had been asked had gone the usual way with muffins, but after an interval another appeared, and we ate it with the solemnity which befits such a dainty. Fanny, who has lately gone in for Imperialism, with great vigour, assured me that she always ate muffins now as being a peculiarly English product; she seemed to fancy that bread-and-butter savoured somehow of the Continent, and therefore of all iniquity. I hoped her principles would injure neither her digestion nor her figure; you cannot be a Dresden Shepherdess and portly!

“I’m so glad you came just at this minute,” she remarked, gulping down her third cup of tea. “I’ve just finished a novel, and I hate starting another immediately. You get so jumbled up.”

“I suppose it is better not to read more than three a week,” I politely agreed.

Fanny is a perfectly omnivorous reader of fiction; the excellent Mr. Mudie has no customer more constant—of course, she never dreams of buying a book—and she devours the spring and autumn outputs with insatiable appetite.

“Don’t try to be sarcastic,” she said, in reply to my observation. “As a matter of fact, I can easily get through an ordinary-sized book in two days. I read Halsbeck [sic] of Bannisdale in four.”

“And The Christian?”

“O, I haven’t read it yet; I know it’s perfectly scandalous (not the book, of course—the fact of not having read it), but I’m keeping it till I have a really bad cold. You know the sort of cold I mean—when you can’t see out of your eyes, and your nose is stuffed up and you feel simply hopelessly...