The unfortunate
creature has a child still every year, and her constant hypocrisy is to
try and make her girls believe that their father is a respectable man,
and to huddle him out of the way when the brute comes home drunk.
Those poor ruined souls get together and have a society of their own,
the which it is very affecting to watch--those tawdry pretences at
gentility, those flimsy attempts at gaiety: those woful sallies: that
jingling old piano; oh, it makes the heart sick to see and hear them. As
Mrs. Raff, with her company of pale daughters, gives a penny tea to Mrs.
Diddler, they talk about bygone times and the fine society they kept;
and they sing feeble songs out of tattered old music-books; and while
engaged in this sort of entertainment, in comes Captain Raff with his
greasy hat on one side, and straightway the whole of the dismal room
reeks with a mingled odour of smoke and spirits.
Has not everybody who has lived abroad met Captain Raff? His name is
proclaimed, every now and then, by Mr. Sheriff's Officer Hemp; and about
Boulogne, and Paris, and Brussels, there are so many of his sort that
I will lay a wager that I shall be accused of gross personality for
showing him up. Many a less irreclaimable villain is transported; many a
more honourable man is at present at the treadmill; and although we
are the noblest, greatest, most religious, and most moral people in the
world, I would still like to know where, except in the United Kingdom,
debts are a matter of joke, and making tradesmen 'suffer' a sport that
gentlemen own to? It is dishonourable to owe money in France.
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