"
The other party to the conversation is a winsome and
agreeable woman, trying her best to do her social duty.
But, tenez, as the Comtesse of Z---- would say, I can
exactly illustrate the position and attitude of the two
of them from a recollection of my childhood. I remember
that in one of my nursery books of forty years ago there
was a picture entitled "The Lady in Love With A Swine."
A willowy lady in a shimmering gown leaned over the rail
of a tessellated pig-sty, in which an impossibly clean
hog stood in an attitude of ill-mannered immobility. With
the picture was the rhyming legend,
There was a Lady in love with a swine,
"Honey," said she, "will you be mine?
I'll build you a silver sty
And in it you shall lie."
"Honk!" said He.
There was something, as I recall it, in the sweet
willingness of the Lady that was singularly appealing,
and contrasted with the dull mannerless passivity of the
swine.
In each of the little stanzas that followed, the pretty
advances of the Lady were rebuffed by a surly and
monosyllabic "honk" from the hog.
Here is the social counterpart of the scene in the
picture-book. Mr. Grunt, capitalist, is standing in his
tessellated sty,--the tessellated sty being represented
by the hardwood floor of a fashionable drawing-room.
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