Will you play, Sir
Denzil?"
"I shall think myself privileged if I may join in your amusements."
"What a courteous speech! You will be cutting off your pretty curly hair,
and putting on a French perruque, like his"--pointing to De Malfort.
"Please do not. You would be like everybody else in London--and now you are
only like yourself--and vastly handsome."
"Hush, Henriette! you are much too pert," remonstrated Fareham.
"But 'tis the very truth, father. All the women who visit mother paint
their faces, so that they are all alike; and all the men talk alike,
so that I don't know one from t'other, except Lord Rochester, who is
impudenter and younger than the others, and gives me more sugar-plums and
pays me prettier compliments than anybody else."
"Hold your tongue, mistress! A dinner-table is no place for pert children.
Thy brother there has better manners," said her father, pointing to the
cherubic son and heir, whose ideas were concentrated upon a loaded plate of
red-deer pasty.
"You mean that he is greedier than I," retorted Papillon. "He will eat till
he won't be able to run about with us after dinner; and then he will sprawl
upon mother's satin train by the fire, with Ganymede and Phosphor, and she
will tell everybody how good and gentle he is, and how much better bred
than his sister.
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