"The expense of this journey, unavoidable as it was! is very considerable, so that I reckon upon your practising the strictest economy during my absence." I thought I'd choke, Molly, when I seen this. Just think of the daring impudence of the man telling me that while he is lavishing hundreds on his vices and wickedness, the family is to starve to enable him to bear the expense. "The strictest economy during my absence." I wish I was near you when you wrote It!
Then comes in some balderdash about the scenery, and the place they 're at, just as coolly described as if it was talking of Bruff or the neighborhood; the whole winding up with, "Mrs. G. H. desires me to convey her tender regards"--what she can spare, I suppose, without robbing him--"to you and the girls. No time for more, from yours sincerely,
There's an epistle for you! You 'll not find the like of it in the "Polite Letter-Writer," I 'll wager. The father of a family--and such a family too!--discoursing as easily about the height of iniquity as if he was alluding to the state of the weather, or the price of sheep at the last fair. He flatters himself, maybe, that this free-and-easy way is the best to bamboozle me, and that by seeming to make nothing of it, I 'll take the same view as himself. Is that all he knows of me yet? Did he ever succeed in deceiving me during the last seventeen years? Did n't I find him out in twenty things when he did n't know himself of his own depravity? I tell you in confidence, Molly, that if coming abroad is an elegant thing for our sex, it's downright ruin to men of K. I.'s time of life! When they come to fifty, or thereabouts, in Ireland, they settle down to something respectable, either on the Bench, or Guardians to the Union. Their thoughts runs upon green crops and draining, and how to raise a trifle, by way of loan, from the Board of Works. But not having these things, abroad, to engage them, they take to smartening themselves up with polished boots and blackened whiskers, and what between pinching here, and padding there, they get the notion that they 're just what they were thirty years ago! Oh dear! oh dear! sure they 've only to go upstairs a little quick, to stoop to pick up a handkerchief, or button a boot, to detect the mistake, and if that won't do, let them try a polka with a young lady just out for her first season!