Page:Paul Clifford Vol 1.djvu/103

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PAUL CLIFFORD.
73

joyous feeling of emancipated independence, Paul walked on he knew not whither, with his head in the air, and his legs marshalling themselves into a military gait of defiance. He had not proceeded far, before he heard his name uttered behind him,—he turned, and saw the rueful face of Dummie Dunnaker.

Very inoffensively had that respectable person been employed during the last part of the scene we have described, in caressing his afflicted eye, and muttering philosophical observations on the danger incurred by all those who are acquainted with ladies of a choleric temperament: when Mrs. Lobkins, turning round after Paul's departure, and seeing the pitiful person of that Dummie Dunnaker, whose name she remembered Paul had mentioned in his opening speech, and whom, therefore, with an illogical confusion of ideas, she considered a party in the late dispute, exhausted upon him all that rage which it was necessary for her comfort that she should unburthen somewhere.

She seized the little man by the collar—the tenderest of all places in gentlemen similarly circumstanced with regard to the ways of life,