was by no means free from the imputation of “one who loves rarity for rarity’s sake,” has given a capital anecdote relating to this inferior order of collectors.
It refers to a man named Turner, a great chinaman, who had a jar cracked by the shock of an earthquake. The price of the jar was originally ten guineas, but after the accident he asked twenty, because it was the only jar in Europe that had been cracked by an earthquake.
MISS SIMMS.
The little girl was too charming to be resisted. In vain I called to my aid all the gravity and soberness that beseemed my age. In vain I held up myself to myself as a person already within the verge of old fogydom. In vain I propounded and solved elaborate arithmetical problems as to the variable proportions which sixteen would assume to forty at advanced stages of life. I know that last sentence is not correctly expressed, but let it pass. Thus stood the case; Charlotte was sixteen and I forty, and I, more than double Lotty’s age—almost old enough to be her respectable papa—I found myself irretrievably enslaved by that young person, and trotting captive at her chariot-wheels,—or, more properly, the wheels of her infantine go-cart. I had nursed Lotty, she had ridden a cock-horse upon my knee. I had kissed her moist lips when kissing was a ceremony performed rather for the sake of politeness to mamma than for any pleasantness in itself. I had made Lotty ill with surreptitious sugar-plums; I had presented her with Christmas-boxes of the most astonishing toys; I had assisted in the instilling of the alphabet into her youthful mind by means of highly-coloured pictures, in a painful state of alliteration; I had begged Lotty out of the corner, where she stood obstinate, finger in mouth, and with a general humidity of countenance. I had thought Lotty a dirty child when I saw her paddling with her little fat hands in a puddle, or with traces of lollipops about her innocent mouth. I had execrated Lotty as a nuisance and a bore when she would poke her pug nose into my flirtation with Miss Mirables (who married afterwards Lord Methuselah). And at last, it had come to this! We had changed places. I was the child now, and Miss Lotty was mistress over me, and she knew it. She threw me a sugar-plum when she so pleased; she taught me a letter of some sweet sibillating alphabet when she had nothing better to do; she patronised me, and began to take an interest in my temper and morals; she petted me when she lacked amusement, and when she was otherwise engaged gave me to understand in the plainest manner that I was a consummate bore, and an unmitigated nuisance—that I was.
Miss Lotty knew all about it. In vain I tried to treat her as a child. She laughed in my face at the transparent absurdity of the pretence. In vain I affected indifference. She exacted attention, and would not be snubbed. She flirted with small boys for the express purpose of vexing me, and knew that I was vexed, and I knew that she knew it.
In what manner, or at what precise time she left off being a child, and began to be a woman I do not know. She passed out of the nursery by no sensible transition and took to her Missdom quite naturally. Juliet of the house of Capulet, brought out by her provident mother at the age of fourteen, did not assume her new honours with a more perfect coolness.
This, then, was the state of the case. I, who had overlived all my youthful heart-weaknesses, who prided myself on being safe henceforth from the subtlest fascinations of the female sex, fell into captivity at the hands of a little girl just out of the nursery. Having struggled in vain, I succumbed, and began to think seriously whether sixteen and forty were, after all, such incompatible ages. It was not quite a case of January and May. If I had been sixty, and a lord, there would have been nothing unusual in the notion. If I had been a widower, and possessed of a daughter a little older than Lotty, the match would have been perfectly en règle. The difference was on the right side. It was not as bad as if I had married my first love, who was forty when I was sixteen.
An elder than herselfLet still the woman take
An elder than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband’s heart.
So I ceased to compare myself with the small boys with whom Lotty flirted, I turned a blind eye on the budding obesity of my figure, and began to consider the matter as an accomplished fact.
Miss Lotty had an aunt—a very respectable person—of mature age. Miss Simms was the name of this lady, and Miss Simms and I had always been great friends. She was a gushing person, strongly sympathetic, and given to the study of the minor poets of the last generation. We had often exchanged sympathies, had often discoursed together on the affections after a diluted Platonic manner, and she was accustomed to apply to me for explanations of namby-pamby passages of her favourite poets.
Miss Simms occupied that place in the family which maiden aunts so often fill. To make things generally pleasant, to be a general go-between, the friend of everybody, the deliverer of messages, the arranger of the delicate amenities of social life—such was Miss Simms’ mission.
Her age was certainly verging towards fifty. She was well-preserved; had expressive eyes, hair scrupulously neat, but very thin, white, angular hands, a sweet, faint smile, and a purring sort of voice.
I respected Miss Simms immensely, I had a great friendship for her. The idea struck me that I would make her my confidant with regard to Lotty. She was the very person for a confidant. I could not, for the life of me, have broken the subject to papa or mamma. Lotty was a child to them still, and I felt that it would scarcely have seemed more ridiculous to them for me to confess a tender passion for the infant in long clothes than to hint the state of my heart towards Lotty. I had determined to make some move, and the aunt
