For her hobby
is to discourse of well-born and titled people and county families, with
whom (and with no others) it has always been her hope and desire to mix;
and is still, though her hair is nearly white, and she is still here.
She thinks and talks and cares about nothing else but "smart people,"
and has conceived a very warm regard for me, on account of
Lieutenant-colonel Ibbetson, of Ibbetson Hall, Hopshire; not because I
killed him and was sentenced to be hanged for it, or because he was a
greater criminal than I (all of which is interesting enough); but
because he was my relative, and that through him I must be distantly
connected, she thinks, with the Ibbetsons of Lechmere--whoever they may
be, and whom neither she nor I have ever met (indeed, I had never heard
of them), but whose family history she knows almost by heart. What can
be tamer, duller, more prosaic, more sordidly humdrum, more hopelessly
sane, more characteristic of common, under-bred, provincial
feminine cackle?
And yet this woman, in a fit of conjugal jealousy, murdered her own
children; and her father went mad in consequence, and her husband cut
his throat.
In fact, during their lucid intervals it would never enter one's mind
that they were mad at all, they are so absolutely like the people one
meets every day in the world--such narrow-minded idiots, such deadly
bores! One might as well be back in Pentonville or Hopshire again, or
live in Passionate Brompton (as I am told it is called); or even in
Belgravia, for that matter!
For we have a young lord and a middle-aged baronet--a shocking pair, who
should not be allowed to live; but for family influence they would be
doing their twenty years' penal servitude in jail, instead of living
comfortably sequestered here.
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