It was necessarily but a sprinkling of any class of Barnacles that

attended the marriage, for there were not two score in all, and what

is that subtracted from Legion! But the sprinkling was a swarm in the

Twickenham cottage, and filled it. A Barnacle (assisted by a Barnacle)

married the happy pair, and it behoved Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle

himself to conduct Mrs Meagles to breakfast.

The entertainment was not as agreeable and natural as it might have

been. Mr Meagles, hove down by his good company while he highly

appreciated it, was not himself. Mrs Gowan was herself, and that did not

improve him. The fiction that it was not Mr Meagles who had stood in the

way, but that it was the Family greatness, and that the Family greatness

had made a concession, and there was now a soothing unanimity, pervaded

the affair, though it was never openly expressed. Then the Barnacles

felt that they for their parts would have done with the Meagleses when

the present patronising occasion was over; and the Meagleses felt the

same for their parts.

Then Gowan asserting his rights as a disappointed

man who had his grudge against the family, and who, perhaps, had allowed

his mother to have them there, as much in the hope it might give them

some annoyance as with any other benevolent object, aired his pencil and

his poverty ostentatiously before them, and told them he hoped in time

to settle a crust of bread and cheese on his wife, and that he begged

such of them as (more fortunate than himself) came in for any good

thing, and could buy a picture, to please to remember the poor painter.

Then Lord Decimus, who was a wonder on his own Parliamentary pedestal,

turned out to be the windiest creature here: proposing happiness to the

bride and bridegroom in a series of platitudes that would have made the

hair of any sincere disciple and believer stand on end; and trotting,

with the complacency of an idiotic elephant, among howling labyrinths of

sentences which he seemed to take for high roads, and never so much

as wanted to get out of.

Then Mr Tite Barnacle could not but feel that

there was a person in company, who would have disturbed his life-long

sitting to Sir Thomas Lawrence in full official character, if such

disturbance had been possible: while Barnacle junior did, with

indignation, communicate to two vapid gentlemen, his relatives, that

there was a feller here, look here, who had come to our Department

without an appointment and said he wanted to know, you know; and that,

look here, if he was to break out now, as he might you know (for you

never could tell what an ungentlemanly Radical of that sort would be up

to next), and was to say, look here, that he wanted to know this moment,

you know, that would be jolly; wouldn't it?




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