A QUARTER TO SEVEN
At a quarter to seven we were still in what I should describe as the throes. I daresay that sentence is not perfect English, but it is exactly what I mean; and, so long as you have that, what does it matter?
Jane had made such a mess of her crying, and I had found it so difficult to make out what the ridiculous creature was crying about; but it seemed that her young man had spoken to her with freezing coldness that very afternoon, and that, combined with the excitement of the discovery that, as she phrased it, I had put mamma’s and the girls’ noses “out of joint,” by walking off with their five young men—though you could hardly describe Major Tibbet as young—and the agitation occasioned her by my kissing her all of a sudden, had brought her to such a stage that she had
