Upon which occasions Captain Barnabas, with great good humour, always echoed both the Squire's ho--ho--ho! and Mrs Hazeldean's ha--ha--ha!
Not so the Parson. He had so keen and sportsmanlike an interest in the game, that even his adversaries' mistakes ruffled him. And you would hear him, with elevated voice and agitated gestures, laying down the law, quoting Hoyle, appealing to all the powers of memory and common sense against the very delinquencies by which he was enriched--a waste of eloquence that always heightened the hilarity of Mr and Mrs Hazeldean. While these four were thus engaged, Mrs Dale, who had come with her husband despite her headache, sate on the sofa beside Miss Jemima, or rather beside Miss Jemima's Flimsey, which had already secured the centre of the sofa, and snarled at the very idea of being disturbed. And Master Frank--at a table by himself--was employed sometimes in looking at his pumps, and sometimes at Gilray's Caricatures, with which his mother had provided him for his intellectual requirements. Mrs Dale, in her heart, liked Miss Jemima better than Mrs Hazeldean, of whom she was rather in awe, notwithstanding they had been little girls together, and occasionally still called each other Harry and Carry. But those tender diminutives belonged to the "Dear" genus, and were rarely employed by the ladies, except at those times when--had they been little girls still, and the governess out of the way--they would have slapped and pinched each other. Mrs Dale was still a very pretty woman, as Mrs Hazeldean was still a very fine woman. Mrs Dale painted in water colours and sang, and made card-racks and pen-holders, and was called an "elegant accomplished woman." Mrs Hazeldean cast up the Squire's accounts, wrote the best part of his letters, kept a large establishment in excellent order, and was called "a clever, sensible woman." Mrs Dale had headaches and nerves, Mrs Hazeldean had neither nerves nor headaches. Mrs Dale said, "Harry had no real harm in her, but was certainly very masculine." Mrs Hazeldean said, "Carry would be a good creature, but for her airs and graces." Mrs Dale said Mrs Hazeldean was "just made to be a country squire's lady." Mrs Hazeldean said, "Mrs Dale was the last person in the world who ought to have been a parson's wife." Carry, when she spoke of Harry to a third person, said, "Dear Mrs Hazeldean." Harry, when she referred incidentally to Carry, said, "Poor Mrs Dale." And now the reader knows why Mrs Hazeldean called Mrs Dale "poor," at least as well as I do. For, after all, the word belonged to that class in the female vocabulary which may be called "obscure significants," resembling the Konx Ompax, which hath so puzzled the inquirers into the Eleusinian Mysteries; the application is rather to be illustrated than the meaning to be exactly explained.