’No, thank you,’ said Mrs. Sidebottom. ’The wind is blowing, and your roads are stoned with glass clinkers ground into a horrible dust of glass needles that stab the eyes. I remember it. Besides, I am tired with my journey from York. I will sit in the arm-chair and read a novel, and perhaps doze.’
A fire was burning in the bedroom, another in the study. The former did not burn freely at first; puffs of wind occasionally sent whiffs of smoke out of the grate into the study. Mrs. Sidebottom moved from one room to the other, grumbling. One room was cold and the other smoky. Finally she elected to sit in the study. By opening the door on to the landing slightly, a draught was established which prevented the smoke from entering the room.
She threw herself into a rocking-chair, such as is found in every Yorkshire house, from that of the manufacturer to that of the mechanic.
’Bah!’ groaned Mrs. Sidebottom, ’most of these books are about people that cannot interest me; low-class creatures such as one encounters daily in the street, and stands aside from. I don’t want them in the boudoir. Oh! here is one to my taste—a military novel, by a lady, about officers, parades, and accoutrements.’
So she read languidly, shut her eyes, woke, read a little more, and shut her eyes again.
’I hear the front-door bell,’ she said. ’No one to see me, so I need not say, "Not at home."’
Presently she heard voices in the room beneath her—the room given up to Mrs. Cusworth—one voice, distinctly that of a man.
The circumstance did not interest her, and she read on. She began to take some pleasure in the story. She had come on an account of a mess, and the colonel, some captains and lieutenants were introduced. The messroom conversation was given in full, according to what a woman novelist supposes it to be. Infinitely comical to the male reader are such revelations. The female novelist has a system on which she constructs her dialogue. She takes the talk of young girls in their coteries, and proceeds to transpose their thin, insipid twaddle into what she believes to be virile, pungent English, which is much like attempting to convert milk and water into rum punch. To effect this, to the stock are added a few oaths, a pinch of profanity, a spice of indecency, and then woman is grated over the whole, till it smacks of nothing else.