Page 527 - vanity-fair

Poor lady, she did not know what she had done! ‘There—
there’s a little dawg,’ said James, looking frightfully guilty.
‘I’d best go for him. He bites footmen’s calves.’
All the party cried out with laughing at this description;
even Briggs and Lady Jane, who was sitting mute during
the interview between Miss Crawley and her nephew: and
Bowls, without a word, quitted the room.
Still, by way of punishing her elder nephew, Miss Craw-
ley persisted in being gracious to the young Oxonian. There
were no limits to her kindness or her compliments when
they once began. She told Pitt he might come to dinner, and
insisted that James should accompany her in her drive, and
paraded him solemnly up and down the cliff, on the back
seat of the barouche. During all this excursion, she conde-
scended to say civil things to him: she quoted Italian and
French poetry to the poor bewildered lad, and persisted that
he was a fine scholar, and was perfectly sure he would gain
a gold medal, and be a Senior Wrangler.
‘Haw, haw,’ laughed James, encouraged by these compli-
ments; ‘Senior Wrangler, indeed; that’s at the other shop.’
‘What is the other shop, my dear child?’ said the lady.
‘Senior Wranglers at Cambridge, not Oxford,’ said the
scholar, with a knowing air; and would probably have been
more confidential, but that suddenly there appeared on the
cliff in a tax-cart, drawn by a bang-up pony, dressed in white
flannel coats, with mother-of-pearl buttons, his friends the
Tutbury Pet and the Rottingdean Fibber, with three other
gentlemen of their acquaintance, who all saluted poor James
there in the carriage as he sate. This incident damped the in-

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